The Challenge
Coastal Supply Co. is a direct-to-consumer brand selling outdoor and marine equipment through their own website, Amazon, and a network of wholesale partners. They had been running on NetSuite for three years, paying approximately $16,500 per month for licenses, modules, and support.
NetSuite was designed for a broad range of businesses, and Coastal found themselves paying for modules they never used while struggling with the ones they did. Inventory management across their three warehouses required constant manual reconciliation. The order routing logic — deciding which warehouse should fulfill each order based on stock levels, shipping costs, and delivery speed — was handled through a patchwork of custom scripts that broke with every NetSuite update.
Their wholesale pricing model, which varied by partner tier, volume, and product category, was impossibly complex to configure in NetSuite's pricing engine. The finance team spent two days every month reconciling inventory counts between NetSuite, their warehouse management system, and their Shopify storefront.
The Solution
SaaSAway built a custom ERP focused on the three operational areas Coastal actually needed: inventory management, order fulfillment, and wholesale operations.
The inventory module provided real-time stock tracking across all three warehouses with automated reorder points. A unified dashboard showed inventory levels, incoming purchase orders, and outgoing fulfillment in a single view. Integration with their warehouse barcode scanners eliminated manual count entry.
The order routing engine was built as a rule-based system that automatically assigned orders to the optimal warehouse based on available stock, shipping distance to the customer, and carrier rates. Rules could be adjusted by operations staff without developer involvement.
The wholesale module implemented Coastal's tiered pricing model natively. Partner portals allowed wholesale customers to place orders, check inventory availability, and download invoices. Pricing automatically adjusted based on partner tier, order volume, and negotiated category discounts.
Direct integrations with Shopify, Amazon Seller Central, and ShipStation eliminated the middleware layer that had been a constant source of synchronization issues.
The Results
The custom ERP was delivered in ten weeks, including a two-week parallel run period with NetSuite. Data migration covered three years of order history, customer records, and inventory data.
Monthly costs dropped from $16,500 to approximately $2,300 in cloud infrastructure and third-party API fees — a savings of $14,200 per month or over $170,000 per year. The build cost was recovered in under five months.
The operations team reported that monthly inventory reconciliation went from a two-day process to a fifteen-minute automated check. Order routing errors dropped by 94 percent in the first month. Wholesale partners rated the new ordering portal significantly higher than the previous NetSuite portal in satisfaction surveys.
Coastal has since expanded the system to include demand forecasting based on historical sales data and seasonal patterns, a feature that would have required a separate SaaS subscription on top of NetSuite.