In 2019, Imperial Patisserie 皇玥餅藝, Hong Kong’s upscale pastry brand looked to create an online store to complement their two flagship retail stores. The company, known for working with renowned five-star hotel pastry chefs to create iconic products made locally in their Hong Kong factory, wanted to extend their brand vision to delivering a best in-class online buying experience. Wave Commerce worked with Imperial Patisserie to create a modern responsive, consumer-facing Shopify store to take orders that could integrate into the company’s existing Netsuite ERP solution and smoothly facilitate online-to-offline orders (O2O) for seasonal products such as their highly popular mooncakes.

Goal: Elevating the Customer Experience

Imperial Patisserie is known for its mooncakes, created in collaboration with Master Chef Yip Wing Wah, founder of Egg Custard Mooncake and the former Manager for the Dim Sum Section of Spring Moon of The Peninsula Hotel for 30 years. In addition to the many Hong Kong snacks they make locally in the company’s Hong Kong food factory, Imperial Patisserie takes orders for flagship seasonal items, such as its mooncakes. Imperial Patisserie saw the opportunity to reach more customers using an online store, where loyal fans could conveniently make purchases as gifts for recipients to easily redeem.

The company not only wanted to make “Fresh and very Hong Kong” snacks and products to sell at their retail stores, but deliver them in a seamless O2O brand experience. As an enterprise, Imperial Patisserie already had an existing ERP solution with Netsuite that centralised sales channels such as retail stores and third-party POS systems. They wanted a customer-centric online store where shoppers could easily make orders for mooncakes, receive physical or digital vouchers, and redeem the products in-store, while receiving loyalty points. Aware of Shopify as a global ecommerce platform, Imperial Patisserie reached out to Wave Commerce to see how orders from Shopify could be integrated into their existing infrastructure, remain straightforward to update, and provide scalability for growing online sales.

Solution: Best in Class Online Store Integrated with ERP

Wave Commerce helped Imperial Patisserie create their Shopify online store to take orders for mooncakes and pass orders as well as customers account information to the company’s Netsuite ERP. We worked closely with Imperial Patisserie to define the online store experience and its O2O and integration requirements.

Incorporating Shopify for O2O Sales

Using Shopify’s mobile-responsive themes, we created a store for ordering mooncakes that matched Imperial Patisserie’s existing website branding. This included incorporating video content to tell the brand story, as well as user-friendly catalogue and product pages. Product pages were customized so that customers could select whether to get physical vouchers delivered by mail or e-vouchers sent via e-mail. After a customer made the purchase, the order information and corresponding customer account information would be passed onto Netsuite to be fulfilled.

Passing Shopify Orders to Enterprise ERPs

As Shopify did not have a native built-in integration for enterprise ERPs, Wave Commerce worked with Imperial Patisserie to set up a custom solution whereby data would be passed from Shopify to Netsuite. Custom data fields needed to be created the data mapping from Shopify needed to match requirements on the Netsuite side, which then helped staff process sales orders, while also providing customers with one unified brand experience.

Delivering Unified Brand Experiences With Integrated Account Handling

In addition to orders, Wave Commerce designed a solution that could pass customer account information from Shopify to Netsuite that was the cornerstone for a unified customer experience of the brand. For example, Imperial Patisserie shoppers will be able to enjoy the same loyalty program whether purchasing in-store or through the company’s online store. This tailored integration allowed Imperial Patisserie to use the best in-class solutions for both the customer-facing and operations sides of the business.

Once the order flow and customer account information were mapped, Wave Commerce simultaneously built the Shopify storefront for Imperial Patisserie as well as set up and managed the middleware to connect the Shopify store to Netsuite. User acceptance testing by both parties confirmed that the data was passed successfully and in the manner designed.

---

Enterprises looking to deliver great digital and retail consumer experiences should consider taking advantage of the latest cloud ecommerce solutions while integrating with leading class ERP or CRM solutions to create compelling omnichannel customer experiences. We are honoured to have worked with a visionary brand like Imperial Patisserie to design and implement an enterprise-level ecommerce solution to deliver convenience to local Hong Kong consumers and user-friendly workflows for staff.