Lighting Up Blazy Susan's Business Operations with Custom Payment Integration by Peddle

The Challenge

Blazy Susan is a one of a kind DTC and B2B wholesaler and distributor that focuses on cannabis products (or CBD). The claim to fame for Blazy was their take on the traditional Lazy Susan spice organizer, you’ve probably seen at your abuela’s house, but instead of cleaning up your spice rack, the Blazy Susan trey cleans up end tables around the world. Since Blazy Susan makes the majority of their revenue through selling what’s considered “hig-risk” products online, payment processing companies make it tricky to set up payment systems. In this case, Blazy Susan had to use a payment system that integrated with a variety of systems they needed to use for tax document verification, inventory management, warehouse management, project management, invoicing, and sales.

Due to legal requirements, Blazy chose InvoiceNinja on top of their own setup that consisted of WooCommerce for eComm, SKUVault for inventory, and HubSpot for CRM and landing pages. So to throw InvoiceNinja into the mix definitely stirred the pot up and made integrating all of these tools a bit messy. They even tried Zapier but ultimately got smoked out with too many complexities…. Get it?

The Goal

The end game was to create a potent enough custom integration solution that would allow all of their platforms to work together without any distractions. This would track all order and payment transaction data in HubSpot to allow for accurate revenue, product, and accounts receivables reporting to further support the operations of the sales teams and their pipelines. You know… because being able to close deals and make money seamlessly is pretty cool, right?

The Solution

Peddle created a custom-tailored solution to help out Blazy by: 

1. Integrating the Systems: The team connected all the platforms to streamline the revenue operations process and made sure everything worked well together. From WooCommerce -> Avalara -> HubSpot -> Invoice Ninja -> ClickUp -> SKUVault -> ShipStation -> and back to HubSpot for product, revenue, shipping info, and tracking codes.
2. Extended HubSpot Workflow Action: Peddle went the extra mile by editing the functionality of HubSpot’s workflow to be able to send data to a middleware solution without the need for Zapier - no assistance needed, we can roll for ourselves tyvm…
3. Live play by play? Yes Please!: We set up webhook events within Invoice Ninja and Pipedream which allowed for real-time updates to deal stages in HubSpot for Blazy’s sales pipelines.
4. Unique Identifier Property: Peddle implemented a unique identifier property to map HubSpot companies and deals to invoices in Invoice Ninja. This was an absolute MUST for Blazy to be able to track everything accurately in both platforms and avoid duplicates when it came to transactions. Think about all the smoke/tobacco shops that have no online presence, how would you be able to track them all? 
5. What about the distributors?: Once we understood how difficult it was for shops without domain names, we decided to create an alternative mapping solution for parent-child relationships to allow the Blazy Susan team to tag parent/child relationships of companies with different names, domains (or no domain), to synchronize the records for future reporting and marketing needs. This was vital because the data hygiene needed to hold up across all platforms like SKUVault, WooCommerce, InvoiceNinja, and most importantly… HubSpot! 

The Result

Who doesn’t love a happy ending to a good story? (Unless you’re into cliffhangers and the inevitable sequel that may be a hit or miss) Well here is how Peddle DROVE impact: 

• Cohesity: Blazy’s marketing, sales, and ops were now all working well together and had HubSpot as their source of truth. This helped improve their overall efficiency and collaborations across teams. 
• Logistical Efficiency: By integrating all of Blazy Susan's technology for eCommerce (WooCommerce), CRM (HubSpot), Warehouse Management Systems (SKUVault), Payment Processing (InvoiceNinja), Project Management (ClickUp), and Tax Document verification (Avalara), the team was now able to take payment and fulfill orders without any breaks in the chain or missing data.
• Numbers that Make Sense: Through the bidirectional synchronization of invoicing between HubSpot and InvoiceNinja, Blazy now had accurate and reliable reporting. So meetings with Stakeholders are instantly more valuable because they were able to provide actionable insights for business performance. 
• Never Running Dry: Whenever new invoices have line items for specific products, the integration we built pulled inventory data that synced to all systems, InvoiceNinja, HubSpot, and SKUVault. From there the integration would update HubSpot and Invoice Ninja accordingly - we all love efficiency and so did Blazy so they would never have any issues with order fulfillment across multiple warehouse locations.

The Numbers Speak for Themselves!: The power of HubSpot was able to help another business automate business to grow at a miraculous rate. The team saved over +400 hours each month on order processing and inventory management, that's more than TWO FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES worth of time! Not to mention the growth enabled by the ability to have accurate reporting across the entire operation, with HubSpot acting as the source of truth for all customer data. Within a few short years, Blazy Susan went from $1M to +$50M in annual revenue. Now that's A LOT of good times!