Union Jack Tools is a specialist e-commerce store offering FDA-compliant stainless steel and plastic tools for the food and beverage industries. When Chris and Cheryl Joyce purchased the business, they had big ambitions to grow order volumes and revenue. With a small team running the entire operation, their time was precious.
Their storefront on BigCommerce was already working well — packed with quality products, with a fast and simple checkout experience for customers. Order management, however, was a different story.
The Challenge: Bogged Down by Manual Processes
The Joyces inherited a drop-ship fulfillment model, which should have saved time by eliminating the need to manage inventory and warehousing. Unfortunately, it was mired in tedious manual processes that quickly bogged them down.
“Order management was a huge challenge for us,” says Chris. “The individual we bought the business from had been doing everything by hand — from creating purchase orders to sharing data with vendors — and hadn’t integrated much in the way of technology to automate key processes.”
Every purchase order had to be created from scratch: trawling through order confirmations, jumping between multiple systems to find prices, product IDs, quantities, and shipment addresses, then manually pasting or inputting the data. Union Jack also offered pre-prepared product bundles, where items in the same bundle came from different suppliers — requiring multiple purchase orders, each checked carefully to ensure the right items went to the right vendors.
“When you’re manually inputting so much data, it’s easy to make a mistake,” says Chris. “A simple mistyped number in a SKU could mean the wrong color, item, or quantity was sent out. A mistake in an address field would fire a product off to the wrong destination.”
With much of the catalog made up of large, heavy items, a single shipping error could cost up to $20 to correct — wiping out the margin on an order in one hit.
The back-end was just as hands-on. Once a vendor shipped an order, they’d email an invoice and tracking number. Chris would trawl through the email, open the attachment, and manually key the details into QuickBooks. Keeping customers updated on tracking added even more time.
The whole process wasn’t just frustrating — it was pulling Chris and Cheryl away from marketing, merchandising, and customer visits that were critical to growing the business.
“We quickly realized that we couldn’t scale as a business if we kept doing everything by hand, so we had to urgently shift our strategy. We needed to find a way of automating key processes, but I was worried I wouldn’t find a vendor who understood our specific niche in drop-shipping fulfilment.”
Then he discovered Duoplane.
The Solution: Automated Order Fulfilment Built for Drop Shipping
“I knew right away that Duoplane was the perfect fit for us, because they’re 100% focused on solving problems and providing automation for online businesses who use a completely distributed drop-ship model,” says Chris.
Duoplane integrated with Union Jack’s BigCommerce storefront and QuickBooks. Chris received hands-on onboarding support at no extra cost — Duoplane set up the integrations, ensured data was migrating properly, and spent time understanding his business and supplier setup before go-live.
“I had some initial work to configure vendors and set up users for each supplier, but I only needed to do that once. When that upfront work was done, Duoplane had everything it needed to automate the manual processes that had been taking over my workday.”
Within weeks, the entire order management process was digitized and automated:
Automated order routing to multiple suppliers. Duoplane connects to the BigCommerce store, pulls the order data it needs to generate a purchase order, and sends it directly to the correct vendor — automatically. For product bundles with items from different suppliers, Duoplane splits and routes the purchase orders correctly, with 100% accuracy.
Flexible catalog management. If Chris wants to change a price or product, he makes the change once in his storefront. Duoplane picks it up and reflects it on the next purchase order — no updates needed across multiple systems.
Automated invoicing and bookkeeping. Instead of emailing invoices, vendors now fill in three fields on a dedicated vendor portal: shipping cost, tracking information, and invoice number. Duoplane automatically creates the invoice and exports the details to QuickBooks. No more manual data entry.
Vendor-specific customizations. When a vendor needed a specific tariff line item added to purchase orders, Duoplane added a conditional rule for that vendor — automated instantly. When another vendor introduced a bulk discount for orders of 20 units, the new rule was created and live within 24 hours.
Duoplane are problem-solvers by nature and always helpful and flexible. Sometimes I feel like they must have been around for 20 years, because whenever I have a drop-shipping issue, they have a ready-made solution.
— Chris Joyce
The Results: Double the Orders, No Extra Time
Union Jack’s order volume doubled month-over-month, and revenue grew 35% year-over-year after integrating Duoplane. That growth was only possible because Duoplane gave Chris and Cheryl their time back.
Without Duoplane, Chris estimates he would have needed to hire two full-time assistants to keep up with order volume. With end-to-end automation handling it, that need was eliminated entirely — saving $50k+ in salaries every year.
Human error, which previously cost real money in reshipping fees, has been all but eliminated.
“Duoplane removes so many potential points of failure and error. Before, we’d lose money when we had to reship and correct any mistakes, but now there are none.”
“Duoplane has put so many problems to bed that we can now put all our focus on growing the business. We barely have to lift a finger on order processing now, so we can focus on creating better SEO, email campaigns, and blog posts that drive our sales and revenue.”
“With Duoplane, I feel like we could scale to the size of a large corporation. We can easily manage double the orders and it doesn’t cost us any extra time or trouble.”