HSWSupply

The Challenge

HSWSupply is a Chicago-based wholesale vape and smoke-shop distributor selling business-to-business. Their web store looked dated and was hard to use, and their e-commerce platform, BigCommerce, charged heavily on transactions — a cost that kept climbing as the business grew.

The Approach

We treated it as two problems. First, the storefront: a full interface redesign to make it modern and easier to use. Second, the cost structure: instead of continuing to pay per-transaction fees, we proposed a custom web application built from scratch around how a wholesale business actually runs — purchase orders, state-by-state tax rules and repeat ordering.

The Build

The application was written in Python on the Django framework, with Vue.js powering the interface. We built the order logic ourselves: pricing that recalculates automatically as items are added to a purchase order, and tax applied to each order based on the state it is placed from. Alongside the software, we edited the product images across the catalog and created an email newsletter for their customers.

Key Features

• Automatic price calculation as items are added to a purchase order
• Automatic sales-tax calculation based on the state an order is placed from, and that state's tax laws
• Suggested future orders, generated from the products that have been selling
• A redesigned, modern storefront interface
• Edited product imagery and a customer email newsletter