Curtis

Curtis Foodservice Equipment - B2B Commerce

Curtis Restaurant Equipment wants to revolutionize the foodservice equipment business. With their new B2B self-service portal, they have started the first phase on that journey. A journey that will help their clients with personalized search, recommendations, project management tools and much more.

With decades of experience, Curtis is offering a wide array of services to help their customers achieve culinary excellence across diverse industries – from chain restaurants to large-scale franchises and everything in between.

To support better self-service options to their customers, they were looking for a flexible commerce platform and a partner to do the implementations.

Medusa

Medusa was selected as the core commerce platform, using Medusa Cloud for backend hosting and Vercel for frontend hosting.

The reason for choosing Medusa you might ask?

  • Highly flexible

  • Easy to customize

  • Open-Source / No license

  • Modern Tech Stack

Flexibility is very important, as Curtis plans to create much more than just a normal B2B Portal for their customers. As Curtis' clients often run larger projects, part of the future plans is to incorporate tools to help planning these projects and optimize deliveries to their clients. Or put another way - to make rather complex kitchen projects an easy and smooth experience.

ACH, Invoices and Credit Card

As for any B2B self-service portal, showing invoices and being able to pay them are key components. Using ACH for payment, and not only credit cards, is way more common for B2B portals than on B2C sites.

Quoting made easy with Medusa's B2B Starter

Quotes are often heavily used in B2B Commerce. Luckily this is out of the box functionality with Medusa and their B2B Starter. Below you can see an example of what quoting looks for the Curtis implementation.

Integrations

Like in any other commerce solution, there are a number of essential integrations. For Curtis, Pricing, Inventory and Orders involved an integration with their ERP system.

Something that is a bit out of the ordinary, is the use of customer specific pricing, which can be complicated, as well as involve a lot of challenges with data inconsistency. As Medusa is not only a commerce platform, but a very modular ecommerce framework, this was handled by the use of Medusa Price Lists, together with scheduled data transfers.

An alternative option would have been to perform "live lookups", but ERP systems are normally not scaled and architected for performance for such an approach, and usually don't have the necessary uptime requirements that would be needed for doing live lookups.

The Road Ahead

Curtis has a plan to make the B2B Portal an integrated commerce and planning tool. Their clients are returning customers that build larger kitchens in multiple locations,- so planning to get the right equipment at the right time is essential.

This will be part of a future phase, as well as a highly personalized search and recommendation experience.

About Curtis

In 1963, Bob Curtis began what is now one of the leading foodservice equipment and design companies in the United States. Curtis first laid its foundations for foodservice through kitchen design and has since expanded its expertise throughout all areas of the industry. Curtis currently services hotels and hospitals, college campuses, churches, schools, event centers, retirement homes, and beyond. Bob’s sons, Mike and Dan Curtis, continued the legacy that their father had began for many more years and in 2015 making the move to a full Employee Owned Company.

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