How Caffe Ladro Quadrupled Online Sales with TrueCommerce

• A clunky customer experience is a revenue problem, not just a UX problem. Caffe Ladro’s previous platform required staff to field weekly support calls just to help customers place orders. Switching to a simpler, more intuitive storefront was one of the most direct drivers of their sales growth.
• Unified commerce means internal operations benefit just as much as customer-facing ones. By routing both external eCommerce orders and internal wholesale store orders through the same TrueCommerce network, Caffe Ladro eliminated two separate manual workflows with one integration.
• The right platform pays for itself quickly. The TrueCommerce B2B eCommerce solution covered its cost within a single holiday season, driven by higher order volume and the operational efficiency to fulfill it without adding staff.

Caffe Ladro has been a Seattle coffee institution since 1994. The company sources and roasts its own single-origin and blend coffees, bakes its own pastries and desserts, and operates sixteen retail cafes across the Seattle area. Caffe Ladro sells both direct to consumers and through wholesale channels, with coffees and baked goods available online. Web-based sales serve as an increasingly central part of the business, alongside the company's growing subscription coffee customer base.

Caffe Ladro’s previous eCommerce platform created friction at every layer of the order process. The storefront was difficult for customers to navigate, generating a steady stream of support calls to staff each week. Online sales were limited by what the platform could support, and the overall experience fell short of what the brand wanted to offer.

Internally, the problems ran just as deep. Caffe Ladro’s sixteen retail cafes are also its largest wholesale customers, placing coffee orders twice a week. Those orders arrived as paper printouts and had to be hand-entered into QuickBooks Enterprise, a tedious, error-prone process that Wholesale Marketing Coordinator Adrienne Kerrigan described as mind-numbing. Any mistake made during data entry carried downstream into fulfillment. With order volume growing, the manual workload was not sustainable, and there was no clear path to scaling without either accepting more errors or dedicating more staff hours to a process that should not have required them.

Caffe Ladro moved to the TrueCommerce B2B eCommerce platform, TrueCommerce Shop, later extending the integration to include TrueCommerce EDI and QuickBooks Enterprise across a single unified network.

The new storefront was designed to be straightforward for customers to use, including on mobile devices, which Kerrigan identified as a significant factor in repeat purchase behavior. The platform also supported subscription orders natively, automatically generating new orders in QuickBooks Enterprise each time a subscription renewal was due. Coupon functionality gave the marketing team a practical tool for driving seasonal volume, which proved particularly effective during the holiday period.

On the internal side, retail store managers shifted from paper-based ordering to placing wholesale coffee orders through an in-house online portal. TrueCommerce EDI pulls those orders and exports them directly into the correct account and store location within QuickBooks Enterprise. What had been a 90-minute manual entry task came down to roughly 15 minutes, with meaningfully fewer errors. Both the external customer experience and the internal fulfillment workflow now run through the same integration layer, eliminating the redundancy that had existed between the two.

The results at Caffe Ladro exceeded what the team had anticipated going in. Online sales grew to roughly four times their previous level, a figure Kerrigan attributed in large part to how easy the platform made it for customers to return and reorder, particularly on mobile. The subscription and coupon capabilities gave the team levers they had not had before, and the holiday season following the launch delivered enough volume and fulfillment efficiency to cover the cost of the entire investment.

The time savings on internal order processing were equally significant. Moving retail store managers off paper printouts and onto the online portal removed a manual bottleneck that had required sustained staff attention twice a week across all sixteen locations. Accuracy improved alongside speed, because the integration eliminated the transcription step where most errors had been introduced. By December of the first year, Caffe Ladro was processing 40 to 50 online orders or more on some days, volume that would have been operationally punishing under the old model.

Looking ahead, Caffe Ladro was working to extend the same integration to key external wholesale accounts, which at the time of the case study were still being handled by phone and email. The combination of B2B eCommerce and EDI running through a single network made that expansion a realistic next step rather than a separate project requiring new infrastructure. The broader takeaway from Caffe Ladro’s experience is that integrating commerce channels and back-office systems through one platform compounds over time. Each new use case the team uncovered opened the door to the next one.