Yukon International: A South African Export Producer's Journey to Account-Based B2B Commerce
A brief background on Yukon International
Founded in 1991, Yukon Group has grown into a South African producer, packer, and exporter of specialty produce, including baby vegetables, microgreens, edible flowers, and exotic fruit. Yukon International Pty Ltd is the group's export arm, shipping produce daily by air freight from Cape Town and Johannesburg worldwide. Built around trade accounts rather than public retail, Yukon needed a commerce platform designed for wholesale buyers from the ground up.
Challenges
Yukon came to the project with an existing storefront on nopCommerce 4.20, built for a specialty export business rather than open retail, with pricing, ordering, and backend processes built around account-based commerce instead of public checkout. After an audit, our team identified key development challenges.
Restricting access to the catalog and prices to approved buyers only: Yukon wanted all of its catalogs and prices available only to its approved trade partners, not the general public, and it should also cater for foreign buyers making orders in different currencies. This was difficult since nopCommerce is a retailer first system whereby the pricing is after the login, where each price is tied to the respective account and handling of different currencies.
Catering for the account based payment instead of the card checkout: The export buyers pay for the orders made via the settlement of accounts and not through the cards like most of the payments methods in nopCommerce, which mostly assume that each transaction will be done via card which shall be captured, refunded or voided per order.
Keeping Orders, Prices, and Invoices Aligned with the ERP: Yukon's customer accounts, prices, orders, and invoices needed to stay in sync with the company's ERP so nothing fell out of step, using reliable processes to pull price updates in, push orders and shipments out, and retry any order that failed to sync.
Handling Export Logistics and Multiple Ship-To Destinations: As an air freight exporter, Yukon needed to manage shipments to multiple destinations per buyer, each with its own departure and destination codes, rather than one address per customer, and to generate shipping paperwork automatically once an order was confirmed.
Enabling Fast Repeat Ordering for Produce Buyers: Specialty produce buyers reorder the same items frequently, and browsing the full catalog category by category was too slow for that kind of repeat purchasing. Yukon needed buyers to save frequently ordered products, search by name or code, and place large orders quickly, even from a spreadsheet.
Modeling a Role-Based Sales Organization: Yukon's ordering process involves more than a single account holder: sales reps, order and quote assistants, accounting staff, and buyers who manage multiple accounts at once. None of this could be modeled with nopCommerce's default roles, and the team needed a safe way for reps to view the storefront as a specific customer would, without sharing login credentials.
Supporting Last-Minute Order Changes: Specialty produce orders can change right up until the last moment, so locking an order at checkout did not fit how Yukon's buyers operate. They needed to revise their own orders after placing them, while the warehouse still needed a firm cutoff tied to each order's delivery date.
Our Solution
Our team took a plugin driven approach on Yukon's existing nopCommerce 4.20 codebase rather than replacing the platform or starting from scratch, layering account based commerce, ERP integration, and export logistics onto a stable, familiar foundation.
A Gated, Multi-Currency B2B Storefront: Our team built an account-based pricing layer on nopCommerce so prices are tied to each buyer's account and appear after login, while anonymous visitors can still browse without seeing prices. The storefront supports five currencies, rand, dollar, pound, euro, and krona, so buyers see estimated pricing in their own currency, confirmed against the ERP at invoicing.
Image 1.2: Anonymous visitors can browse products, but pricing is reserved for logged-in trade accounts
Account-Based Checkout: We built a dedicated on-account payment option so buyers place orders against their account instead of entering card details, with no capture, refund, or void step at checkout. The final price, including discounts, is confirmed on the invoice once the order ships.
Image 1.3: The storefront's sole payment method, built for on-account trade buyers
Automated ERP Synchronization: Our team built scheduled background jobs that keep customer accounts, price groups, invoices, and shipments synchronized with Yukon's ERP without manual work, including reprocessing for orders that fail to sync. Sales invoices load automatically and are matched to shipments through fulfillment.
Image 1.4: Scheduled jobs keep pricing, invoices, and shipments in sync with the ERP
Multi-Destination Shipping and Export Paperwork: We extended the order and address setup so buyers can maintain several export ship-to destinations, each tagged with its own departure and destination codes. Once an order is confirmed, the platform automatically generates the shipment and invoice records for export.
Image 1.5: Users are able to handle multiple export ship-to addresses
One Click Reorder/Bulk Import: Our team developed a favourites and quick order mechanism which will enable buyers to save and reorder products quickly, in addition to a bulk import/export option for large orders from a spreadsheet.
Image 1.6: Order list is saved for easy repeat order placement
Access Control with Safe Impersonation: We designed the sales structure for Yukon within the system with different access roles such as sales representative, order/quote assistant, accounting and multi-account buyers. Reps can securely view the storefront as a specific customer would, helping them assist buyers without needing that buyer's login details.
Image 1.7: Sales reps start from a searchable list of customer accounts and select one to assist
Self-Service Order Editing Before Delivery: We built a self-service editing window so buyers can change their own order up until the day before its scheduled delivery date, after which it locks automatically for fulfillment. An order shipping on the 17th, for example, can still be edited through the 16th.
Together, these changes turned Yukon's storefront from a standard nopCommerce catalog into a purpose-built trade platform for its export business.
Results:
- Processed 22,721 orders since the platform went live.
- Enabled buyers to order at account-specific wholesale pricing, hidden from anonymous visitors.
- Automated ERP synchronization for customer accounts, price groups, invoices, and shipments.
- Connected 430+ ERP-linked trade accounts, with 90 ordering regularly, backed by a 16-person sales rep team.
- Supported a catalog of 700+ produce products across baby vegetables, microgreens, exotics, and more.
- Implemented account-based payment matching Yukon's on-account settlement model for export buyers.
- Added one-click reordering and saved order lists for high-frequency produce buyers.
- Allowed buyers to edit their own orders up until the day before the scheduled delivery date.
- Enabled ordering across 5 currencies for Yukon's international trade customers.
This project was completed in collaboration between nopStation and Comalytics.
