Context
Govaplast manufactures recycled-plastic products sold through a dealer network. Dealers ordered by email: no traceability for anyone, and a lot of manual work for the internal teams who had to turn those emails into orders.
Business context
- Goal
- Move dealer ordering from email to a traceable webshop.
- Metric
- Share of orders placed through the webshop; manual processing time per order.
- Trade-off
- Dealers wanted the freedom of an email; the business needed structured, traceable orders. Resolved by making the structured path the faster one: quotes and orders in one basket, documents attached rather than retyped.
What made it hard
- Email was convenient for dealers. The webshop had to be faster than writing a mail, or they would keep writing mails.
- Three roles, dealer, sales rep, back office, each needing a different view of the same order.
- Dealers sell with pictures and quotes; the back office works with product lines and documents. One order had to serve both.
- A small team: every screen had to be buildable in weeks, not quarters.
What I did
Research with dealers and the back office
Read the order emails, sat with the people processing them, and mapped what each party actually needed to know at each step.
Ordering and quote flow
One basket for quotes and orders, with uploads for the documents dealers already had, so an order takes less effort than an email.
Order management for internal teams
Every order traceable from request to delivery, with status visible to the dealer and the back office alike.
One source of truth for price and lead time
Prices and lead times live in the platform, not in a PDF or someone’s inbox, so every dealer quotes from the same numbers.
A brochure that is always current
The moodboard view turns the catalogue into a digital brochure dealers can take to their own clients, always up to date and always available.
Role-based views
The same order, scoped per role, so dealers, sales reps and back office see one truth.
The result
For the business: orders arrive structured and traceable instead of as emails, price and lead time have one source of truth, and the internal teams spend their time on exceptions rather than retyping. For dealers: a webshop that is quicker than writing a mail, with quotes, documents and order status in one place, and a digital brochure they can open in front of a client.
- Every order has a status (draft, quote sent, on hold, complete, rejected) that dealer and back office both see, so nobody has to ask by email where an order stands.
- Totals, delivered and processing counts give a dealer their own performance at a glance, with revenue history and top products one click away.
- The list is filterable and exportable: the spreadsheet habit is supported, but the webshop is the source.
Reflection
Replacing a habit is harder than building a feature. The webshop won where it saved dealers a step; the next version should measure exactly where they still fall back to email.