Delivering a multi-brand Shopify and Pocketknife B2B commerce platform
Modern Star is one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading suppliers of educational resources, toys, and learning materials, operating multiple brands and commerce sites
Modern Star required a scalable and flexible commerce solution to support its multi-brand B2B operations and its continued growth.
The Challenge
From late 2024 onwards, Pipelabs has worked with Modern Star on a large programme of work, first to envisage and then to progressively roll out a scalable B2B commerce architecture built on Shopify Plus, with Pocketknife as the B2B enablement layer.
Each Modern Star brand operates slightly differently, requiring tailored implementations, the sites operate across multiple ERP instances, requiring different integration approaches.
In addition, another complex operational challenge is the Modern Star’s annual Toy Fair event, which is managed by Modern Brands. This event represents the largest ordering period of the year, with retailers and education buyers placing high volume orders made up of bundle deals across multiple brands. The orders involve different payment terms, different delivery timelines and purchasing thresholds. The architecture needed to support automated order orchestration, ERP Integration and fulfilment workloads that are capable of handling multi-brand bundle purchases at scale. Furthermore, a custom rep discounting workflow was created, allowing sales representatives to create carts and apply discounts on behalf of customers.
Our Approach
Pocketknife enabled reliable synchronisation of products, pricing, customers and orders while supporting automated purchase order creation and ERP insertion to downstream fulfilment workflows.
Pipelabs used Pocketknife through this build, where they leveraged a broad range of Pocketknife capabilities, including saved carts, recurring orders, quotes and quote to order workflows, cXML punch out and punch back procurement integration. In addition, ERP integrations across Pronto, automated purchase order creation, Portal UI customisations and administrative tooling, sales representative impersonation and ordering and discount workflows.
The outcome
Pipelabs and Modern Star have collaboratively rolled out seven separate B2B commerce brands on the platform, producing a scalable commerce solution capable of supporting complex pricing, discounting, inventory and ordering workflows, alongside multiple ERP integrations (ASW and Pronto) across multiple businesses.
Following the success of an initial Pocketknife integration with Hart Sport (https://hartsport.com.au/), Modern Star expanded the partnership to progressively move its sites onto Shopify with Pocketknife integration.
Pipelabs successfully enabled the platform to manage high transaction volumes while splitting orders by brand, payment terms and delivery requirements during the Toy Fair.
Modern Star works closely with the Pipelabs team through frequent communication across project channels, hands-on collaboration to refine workflows. This close partnership enabled rapid iteration and strong adoption across brands.
