Natures Collection: 26 webshops, 7 currencies and zero manual credit memos

About Natures Collection

Natures Collection runs a group of sheepskin and interior webshops selling across most of Europe. Besides Natures Collection itself, they include Nordic Sheep, Sheepskin House, Lammeskindet, Lammfellhaus, Saueskinnet, Fårskinn and Rocking Sheep. Each brand has its own Shopify store in each country, but the accounts are kept in a single Business Central.

Customers register their returns and exchanges in Returnflows.

The challenge

With 26 stores there are a lot of returns, and every one of them has to end up as a credit memo in Business Central. Getting the amount right isn’t enough. The credit memo has to sit on the right customer based on the buyer’s country and on whether it’s a consumer or a business. Refunded shipping and return label fees have to be posted to the accounts that belong to that country. And finance needs to see which store the return came from.

On top of that, exchanges go through Webshipper, and they must not create an extra document in Business Central.

Around Christmas the number of returns rises sharply, and keying them in by hand wasn’t realistic.

How we solved it

Every five minutes Connectify fetches new and changed orders and returns from all 26 stores. When a return is closed in Returnflows, we create the credit memo in Business Central with the items, quantities, prices and discounts on the return.

The customer is chosen from the buyer’s country and customer type. Each store has its own order origin, such as NCDK, NORDICSE or SHEEPUK, so Business Central shows which store and market a credit memo belongs to. Refunded shipping is posted to that country’s shipping account, and if the customer paid for a return label, the fee goes on its own line on the account for that country.

If the return is part of a Webshipper exchange, we add its lines to the credit memo that already exists instead of creating a new one. Returns where the customer takes a gift card are posted to the gift card item Natures Collection set up for that purpose.

Finally we write a note on the Shopify order with the credit memo number. That way customer service can see the return has been booked without looking it up in Business Central.

The result

Returns from every brand and market are now booked in Business Central without anyone creating credit memos by hand. Shipping and return labels land on the right accounts in each country, and Webshipper exchanges no longer create duplicate documents.

It holds up at Christmas too, when returns peak. All stores and currencies run through the same setup, and the webshops and the accounts agree.

Read more about the Returnflows integration for Business Central.