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For years the business grew on relationships and craftsmanship. But as order volume climbed and the sales team spread across the map, the systems holding everything together started to show their age.
“This company carries on a tradition my wife's family started back in the early 1990s, and we have grown it into a national wholesale business. WizCommerce is helping bring us into a new age.”
The Challenge
Two Disconnected Systems That Refused to Talk
Before WizCommerce, Coastline Art ran on two separate platforms that never worked together. One managed the website. The other ran the back office. Neither shared data with the other, and by the end of 2024 the vendor had stopped funding the website entirely, leaving the two halves of the business completely disconnected.
The result was a daily grind of duplicate work. Every invoice had to be entered into one system, then a rep had to be called to push the data live so it could appear in the other. Even then, invoices came out wrong. Shipping would be missing, a price would be off, or an entire line item would disappear. Reps often could not see their own invoices and would not receive the email, so the office had to track them down and send them by hand. When something looked off, the team had to open one database, search for the order, and if it was not there, open the second database and search all over again.
Inventory was the deeper wound. The company was essentially flying blind, with no live stock visibility and a mountain of back orders as a result. A rep entering an order on an iPad in New Jersey had no way of knowing whether the piece was even available. That order then had to be viewed in the back office and re-keyed by hand, and because the website never communicated with the back office, some orders were lost entirely and never made it into the system at all. Setting up a single new customer could take 24 to 48 hours because it had to be done in the office by an admin. Reps were stressed, the office was buried in cleanup, and the friction ran all the way down to the customer.
“We had two platforms and they did not work together. We were always comparing the two systems to see what was missing, and a lot of the time the invoice was still incorrect. Our reps even had to call us just to approve a customer.”
Turning Point
60 Days to Unify The Website, Rep App & Back Office
After years of patching the gaps, Coastline Art made the decision to move everything onto WizCommerce. The shift was not just a new tool, it was a new way of operating. In place of two systems that argued with each other, the company now runs a single connected platform where the website, the sales rep app, and the back office all share one source of truth.
That connection changed how the work flows. Reps no longer wait on the office to approve customers, because access can be granted directly. Orders entered in the field appear everywhere at once, with no re-keying and no lost paperwork. The back office became the system of record the company never had, tracking inventory, payments, and order status in one place.
What impressed the team most was the pace of getting there. WizCommerce took the platform, the sales rep app, and a brand new website from kickoff to live in 60 days, a timeline the owners admit felt unrealistic when they set it. Weekly working sessions kept the project on schedule, changes were implemented almost daily, and every rep and admin received hands on training so no one was left behind.
“All of us put in a lot of work, but your team made it happen within 60 days, which was not realistic at the time. You have honestly fixed every issue we have had.”
AI in Action
Automation Does The Busywork, So Reps Can Sell
With a connected platform in place, intelligent automation started doing the work that used to eat the team’s day. Inventory now updates itself. The moment a piece sells out, the system automatically makes it unavailable to purchase, so reps and customers stop ordering what the shop cannot ship. That same intelligence flows into reordering, surfacing what is running low so the team can restock before it turns into a back order.
The platform also gives reps a live window into each customer. They can log in as the customer, view the customer’s active cart, and act on it instantly. On one recent call a customer asked for a rate quote, and instead of chasing numbers across systems, the rep simply pulled up the cart, ran the quote, and had the order placed an hour later. Building merchandising is just as quick now, with custom catalogs of 50 to 100 images assembled in less than a day and pushed to a specific group of customers on demand.
“The other day a customer asked me to run a rate quote. I just pulled up their cart, gave them the amount, and they placed the order an hour later. Being able to get into the customer's back office and help them any way possible has been huge.”
Results
90% Fewer Backorders and 10% Revenue Uplift
The before and after is stark. Work that once took two to three days for a rep to piece together now happens in real time. New customer setup dropped from 24 to 48 hours down to about an hour. Image updates that used to take days now take minutes, and website product changes that once required weekly manual cleanup now go live in two seconds. On the admin side, the office is saving more than eight hours every week that used to disappear into data entry and fixing broken records.
Those gains show up in the numbers that matter. Back orders are down 90%. More business is coming in online, with far fewer handwritten and emailed orders to chase. Faster quoting and direct orders are adding at least one to two orders a month, which the owners estimate at $25,000 to $30,000 in additional yearly revenue at a minimum. Overall, they credit the platform with a 10% uplift to the business, and this summer has run busier and steadier than the last.
“The platform is improving our business by around 10%, and faster quoting and direct orders alone are adding $25,000 to $30,000 in yearly revenue. On top of that, our customers find us much more reliable now.”
