International Efficiency
Building logistical intelligence into a multi-currency, multi-inventory, multi-warehouse business.
One of the most common and compelling reasons to replatform to a headless architecture is to properly support international business. Multi-currency support is generally available from monolithic ecommerce platforms, but for businesses fulfilling international orders, the potential logistical efficiencies of multi-warehouse fulfillment can be quickly erased by the limitations of out-of-the-box ecommerce solutions.
With 7mesh, we were solving for a brand with significant audiences in the US, Canada and throughout Europe, with warehousing to support each region. However, while their SaaS ecommerce provider was able to ship product from multiple warehouses, it was not able to curate the products a user could order based on their location respective warehouse. So, for example, a user in Switzerland might order a product that was sold out of the European warehouse, triggering fulfillment from 7mesh’s Canadian warehouse. The higher cost of fulfillment would fall on 7mesh, wasting the effort to lower costs by maintaining multiple warehouses.
To maintain the international efficiency 7mesh had worked to enable, we created a custom headless solution for international warehousing and fulfillment. Visitors to 7mesh.com see the inventory that is available from the warehouse that serves their region. Product availability is visible throughout the shopping journey, eliminating frustrating out-of-stock messages at checkout and enabling a seamless shopping experience for 7mesh customers around the world.
Managing a multi-currency storefront has historically been a major headache for small and medium-sized businesses using monolithic ecommerce platforms, but Shopify’s Markets release, and enhanced internationalized support was perfectly timed for this project.
We streamlined the international shopping experience for users, using international routing with Next.js to detect user regions and set the correct currency and inventory for their region, and leveraged technology partners, in Shopify and Vercel, with a commitment to addressing key international payment concerns like currency conversion, taxes, and user personalization.