Mobile Citizen needed a SuiteCommerce website that could make ordering easier for the nonprofits, schools, libraries, and social welfare agencies it serves. There was just one fairly important snag: the NetSuite item groups behind its offerings couldn't be displayed or purchased natively through SuiteCommerce.
Option 1: Change Mobile Citizen's entire NetSuite item structure, requiring a significant data overhaul and disruption to established business processes.
Option 2: Develop a custom SuiteCommerce solution to make the front-end ecommerce experience work with the NetSuite ERP system Mobile Citizen already relied on.
Surprise—we recommended option 2.
The result: Self-service online ordering, automated sales order processing, and no need to rebuild the back end to accommodate the website. Wins all around.
Client: Mobile Citizen, a Voqal Partners project
Industry: Nonprofit mobile connectivity
Project: NetSuite SuiteCommerce implementation and ecommerce customization
Key functionality: Automated translation between SuiteCommerce kit items and NetSuite item groups
Additional considerations: NetSuite Advanced Revenue Management (ARM), accessibility, B2B self-service ordering, and sales order automation
Outcome: An accessible ecommerce storefront that enables online purchases while preserving Mobile Citizen's existing NetSuite item structure and order management processes
Mobile Citizen provides low-cost, unlimited mobile internet to mission-driven organizations. Its customers include nonprofits, schools, libraries, and social welfare agencies working to expand digital access in their communities.
But while Mobile Citizen's services were built around accessibility, its ordering process wasn't yet self-service.
Customers couldn't purchase products directly through the organization's website. Instead, orders had to be handled through sales representatives and manually entered into NetSuite.
Mobile Citizen needed a NetSuite ecommerce solution that would allow customers to browse and purchase its offerings online, automate sales order creation, and reduce the manual work required to process purchases, with one important requirement: the new SuiteCommerce implementation couldn't disrupt the NetSuite workflows the organization already depended on.
Mobile Citizen used NetSuite item groups to organize the products and services it sold.
For those who aren’t in the know: In NetSuite, an item group combines multiple components into one sellable offering. Unlike a NetSuite kit/package item, an item group maintains its own component-level structure and pricing behavior. For Mobile Citizen, these item groups were also closely connected to established sales order workflows and Advanced Revenue Management requirements.
The problem for Mobile Citizen was that SuiteCommerce doesn't natively support displaying and selling item groups as standard storefront products.
The obvious workaround would have been to convert those item groups into NetSuite kit items, which SuiteCommerce can display and sell. But "obvious" and "good idea" aren't always the same thing.
Converting Mobile Citizen's existing item groups into kits would have required a significant data overhaul. It also risked disrupting established item management processes, complicating historical sales reporting, and creating unnecessary changes to downstream NetSuite workflows.
Essentially, Mobile Citizen would have had to change how its ERP operated just to accommodate a limitation in its ecommerce platform.
Anchor Group needed a way to make those products available online while keeping NetSuite item groups as Mobile Citizen's source of truth.
Rather than redesign Mobile Citizen's NetSuite item structure, Anchor Group developed a custom SuiteCommerce extension and supporting NetSuite scripts that allowed existing item groups to be represented as kit items in the online storefront.
For the customer, the process is simple: find the appropriate offering, add it to the cart, and place an order.
Behind the scenes, considerably more is happening.
The customization automatically creates and displays a corresponding SuiteCommerce kit item for each eligible NetSuite item group. When a customer completes a purchase, the solution translates that kit item back into the correct item group on the NetSuite sales order. This preserves Mobile Citizen's original item structure while enabling a fully functional ecommerce purchasing experience.
When an item group changes in NetSuite, its corresponding SuiteCommerce kit item updates automatically, meaning the website stays current, product records remain consistent, and Mobile Citizen doesn't need to manage the same offering twice.
This NetSuite sales order automation also removes the need for representatives to manually reenter ecommerce transactions into the ERP system.
In other words, the customization bends SuiteCommerce around the business process—not the other way around.
Mobile Citizen chose Anchor Group in part because of its local Midwest presence and because the team arrived with a viable solution already in mind.
The project also benefited from bringing together NetSuite functional consultants and SuiteCommerce developers who understood both sides of the implementation, where the functional consultants could evaluate Mobile Citizen's item groups, sales order structure, and Advanced Revenue Management requirements, and the SuiteCommerce team could then translate those requirements into an accessible, customer-facing ecommerce experience.
This wasn't simply a website design project, nor was it only a NetSuite customization, as the front-end storefront and back-end ERP needed to operate as one connected system without interrupting the processes Mobile Citizen depended on.
By approaching the project as both a SuiteCommerce implementation and a NetSuite workflow optimization, Anchor Group delivered a solution that supported the customer's experience without compromising the organization's internal operations.
After launch, Mobile Citizen's customers gained an accessible, self-service way to purchase products online, and orders that previously required help from a sales representative can now flow from SuiteCommerce into NetSuite while preserving the organization's item-group structure.
For customers, this solution allows for a simpler purchasing experience and less dependence on phone-based ordering.
For Mobile Citizen, this solution means fewer manual order-entry tasks, more consistent ecommerce-to-ERP workflows, and more time for sales representatives to focus on outreach, customer relationships, and expanding the organization's digital-equity mission.
Mobile Citizen didn't have to choose between launching ecommerce or preserving the NetSuite processes that already worked. In fact, Anchor Group said, “why not both?”
With a custom SuiteCommerce extension, automated item group-to-kit translation, and integrated sales order processing, Anchor Group connected the two—turning an unsupported item type into a streamlined online purchasing experience.
The resulting solution is a practical example of what the right NetSuite customization can accomplish: making complex systems work together while keeping the experience simple for the people using them.
Not every ecommerce challenge requires a new ERP structure, major data migration, or an entirely different platform. Sometimes, it requires the right customization.
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Not natively as standard storefront products. However, custom SuiteCommerce extensions and NetSuite scripts can provide a way to display and sell offerings represented by item groups while preserving their underlying NetSuite structure.
Both combine multiple items into one sellable offering, but they behave differently in pricing and transaction processing. Item group pricing is based on member items, while kit items can have their own pricing.
SuiteCommerce supports integrated ecommerce transactions within NetSuite. Custom scripts can also modify sales order processing to accommodate specific item types or business workflows.
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