Vitawerx: Life’s a box of (healthy) chocolates

Vitawerx is a health food manufacturer with an unbeatable product: healthy keto chocolate protein bars. When first launching, their company originally sold  a natural antioxidant energy drink, but when their chocolate bar product started flying off the shelves, they pivoted their whole business around it. Today, they export to multiple countries, and have seven different distributors Australia-wide, servicing just under 1,000 retail stores. While they sell direct-to-consumer (D2C) via their online shop, the bulk of their business is B2B.

When their chocolate product became super successful, Vitawerx found themselves unable to manage their turnover manually. So they turned to Cin7 to manage their inventory, enabling accurate record-keeping with Xero, and increasing their product visibility. It’s helped enormously, says Vitawerx Operations Manager, Sally Taylor.

“Now that’s been sorted, it’s a breeze. All our inventory is adding up correctly,” she says.

However, one big problem remained: their wholesale sales process was eating up enormous amounts of time.

At the time, Vitawerx had staff manually enter purchase orders from distributors. On the first of each month, their seven different retail distributors would place orders for the following month, requesting up to five pallets of goods each time. Staff members would have to manually write out each order, which would often include 40 or 50 SKUs.

“You can imagine staff having to manually enter that data, for at least seven different companies, every month,” Sally says. “It was time-consuming, and there were quite a lot of human errors happening as well on our behalf.”

Vitawerx first began trialling the new Cin7 B2B Online Stores in September 2020. They went live with the new store in January of 2021, and the difference is night and day.

“The B2B Online Stores has just made our lives so much easier,” Sally says. “It’s just saved us so much time, and everything’s actually accurate as well.”

Instead of having staff laboriously entering purchase orders, distributors can instead log in to a password-protected website, fully white-labeled with Vitawerx’s branding. There, they can pick exactly what they want, when they want it, from the available stock in Cin7. The orders are sent directly to the warehouse, and everything — from accounting to shipping —  is synced up with Cin7.

For Vitawerx, the benefits were immediately obvious. Sally says the new B2B Online Stores has saved multiple people at Vitawerx a full day or more of work each month, every month. “We’ve saved time for warehouse staff, for sales staff, and in data entry,” Sally says.

Sally says that the biggest change has been reducing the amount of backend data entry and manual calculations they’d previously had to do. “It’s just taken all that out of it for us. I don’t have to worry about having to allocate at least a day for one of my staff members to solely do data entry now.”

There have been huge benefits on the warehouse side as well. Previously, sorting a distributor’s order might have taken an hour or more just to pack the pallet, with warehouse staff having to double-check items with operations staff. But that’s all changed thanks to the tight integration of the B2B Online Stores with Cin7.

“Now, when warehouse staff are packing orders, they can trust the information in front of them. It improves their efficiency. And the number of  complaints we receive about stock being wrong is almost non-existent,” Sally says.

In addition to advantages for Vitawerx, their distributors have been thrilled with the ease-of-use of the new B2B Online Store.

“It’s so simple to use,” Sally says. “All our products are there. Customers can easily see the pricing, and it’s literally like a two-minute process for them to see what the product is, add it to cart and process the order. It’s saved a lot of time, and it’s easy for them.”

Sales, too, have benefited. When customers log in, they can now see all of Vitawerx’s products on one page, without having to flip through catalogs “seeing what lines we do have and what we don’t have,” Sally says. While at first there were worries from some customers about what the new system would require of them, these soon dissipated once customers realised how easy it was to use the store. “When I first told them they were going to have to start placing orders online, they were sort of dreading it because they said, ‘We’ve got to obviously enter it in our system and then on yours as well.’ But then, when I showed them how simple it is to actually use it, we haven’t had any complaints — they’ve said it’s completely fine.”

Now that Vitawerx has been using their B2B Online Stores for several months, Sally says they’d unhesitatingly recommend it to other wholesale product businesses.

“It’s going to improve your efficiency. It simplifies tasks, especially for staff. Setting it up is such an easy process, and it’s just so simple. Honestly, go for it.”