Xponential Fitness (NYSE: XPOF) is the largest global franchise group of boutique fitness brands. Their diversified portfolio of fitness brands spans verticals including Pilates, barre, rowing, indoor cycling, dance, yoga, running, boxing, stretching and functional training. In partnership with franchisees, Xponential operates 2,100+ fitness studios in 12 countries that serve more than 500,000 members.
Connecting
BigCommerce and NetSuite
Key Workflows
ERP, order and fulfillment flow, store credits, SKU matching, pricing, inventory
Xponential’s multi-brand, equipment and merchandise platform model has proven to be extremely successful for franchisees, who generate an average cash-on-cash return of 40%. Ensuring franchisees are supported, and set up to succeed, from pre-studio opening to ongoing monitoring and operations has been instrumental to Xponential’s success.
As Xponential was gearing up for their initial public offering, the team knew they needed to strengthen financial management across their internal business and franchisees. Financial controls, and having an accurate view of the business, were key requirements for entering the public market. They had purchased Oracle’s NetSuite ERP to be their financial source of truth, but in order to get an accurate and real-time view of their finances Xponential needed to connect their business operating units to NetSuite.
BigCommerce and NetSuite
At the top of their integration priority list was connecting NetSuite with BigCommerce. Xponential operates 10 unique BigCommerce stores (one for each of their brands) with thousands of product and inventory SKUs. These BigCommerce stores are where franchisee’s order equipment, branded merchandise, and fitness accessories to use, and sell, in their studios.
When a franchisee places an order on any of Xponential’s BigCommerce stores, BigCommerce sends the order directly to Xponential’s ShipStation WMS instance, which the fulfillment team uses to run their owned and operated warehouse. As an order progresses through to fulfillment, ShipStation sends updates back to BigCommerce. Since Xponential had already connected their BigCommerce stores to ShipStation, and the order-to-fulfillment process was working smoothly, the team wanted BigCommerce to be the central clearing house that sends both order and fulfillment data into NetSuite.
In NetSuite, each of Xponential’s brands are represented as a subsidiary. In addition to needing to connect the BigCommerce stores (each responsible for order and fulfillment data) to NetSuite, the Xponential team needed a way to support BigCommerce store credits, and have them appropriately reflected in NetSuite. For Xponential, BigCommerce store credits are a key piece of the franchisee experience. Xponential can allocate franchisee’s BigCommerce store credit to be used for future equipment, merchandise, and accessory purchases. To be their financial source of truth, NetSuite needed a way to capture customer’s (franchisee’s) outstanding BigCommerce store credit, and deduct credit as it’s used for purchases.
Searching for the right integration solution
The Xponential team was initially making manual, batched updates between BigCommerce and NetSuite. This non-automated process was extremely time consuming, error prone, and resulted in a lack of visibility into the line item detail for orders.
The team investigated using an existing iPaaS (integration as a service, such as Celigo, Workato or Boomi) to connect NetSuite with BigCommerce. They quickly realized that iPaaS solutions were capable of supporting basic NetSuite functionality; however, their complexity, cost and lack of order management capabilities didn’t meet Xponential’s requirements (10 BigCommerce stores, thousands of SKUs and inventory per store, supporting BigCommerce store credits in NetSuite).
The team was having no success finding a technology platform that aligned with Xponential’s business model, especially the need to support franchisee store credits in the order flow. What made things even more challenging was that the company desperately needed to minimize the disruption to their financial operations since they were in the middle of gearing up for their IPO.
Then Xponential found Pipe17. The promise of an ecommerce post-checkout platform that’s built to bridge the order management gaps between their selling channels (BigCommerce) and operational and financial systems (NetSuite) without extensive coding was compelling. The Pipe17 team’s ecommerce, integration, and NetSuite expertise gave Xponential confidence that Pipe17 was the solution for them.
Solution
Pipe17 quickly became the core piece of Xponential’s operational systems— connecting their selling platforms with their financial and back-office systems and synchronizing orders, fulfillments, inventory, product catalogs, pricing, and store credits between their 10 BigCommerce stores and NetSuite.
“We have no better technology partner than Pipe17, which we use to connect our multiple BigCommerce malls to our NetSuite environment.”
Pipe17’s unique ecommerce capabilities enable rapid go-lives for each of Xponential’s BigCommerce stores. Some capabilities that Xponential was searching for, e.g. supporting BigCommerce store credits in NetSuite, were not in Pipe17’s platform when the teams first met.
What made Pipe17 stand out from the rest of the solutions Xponential previously considered was that the Pipe17 team had the expertise to help Xponential flesh out the requirements they needed, and then quickly get those developed and added as features to the Pipe17 platform – which other Pipe17 customers can also take advantage of. The Pipe17 team learned Xponential’s business model and needs quickly, and they were even able to provide NetSuite expertise beyond what the Oracle NetSuite team was able to offer.
Results
Today, using Pipe17, Xponential can integrate a new BigCommerce store into NetSuite in a matter of days.
Pipe17’s robust software platform enabled Xponential’s team to truly deliver an integrated franchise platform and company-wide financial source of truth. With their selling, fulfillment, and financial data all connected, Xponential can deliver accurate financials on demand. The team’s customer and franchisee friendly vision, combined with Pipe17’s technology and team, provides Xponential with agility for current needs and power for future growth.
