Witmer Public Safety Group: A SuiteCommerce implementation rescue built on straight answers

The SuiteCommerce implementation mistakes behind the technical debt 

Witmer's original SuiteCommerce Advanced developer partner had modified internal code rather than extending the framework through its APIs, resulting in a SuiteCommerce Advanced customization that left Witmer with a platform David described as “very unmaintainable.” 

However, when he met Anchor Group’s NetSuite SuiteCommerce consultants, the conversation felt different. “When I talk to [Anchor Group], I’m not talking to a salesperson—I’m talking to an IT person,” he recalled. Anchor Group reviewed the environment, explained what it found, and helped the organization understand the options before promising a fix. For a hands-on IT director, that was what David wanted from a SuiteCommerce consultant and a SuiteCommerce partner.

Anchor then assessed the scope of the problem, helped stabilize the troubled site, and provided SuiteCommerce Advanced support.

SuiteCommerce vs BigCommerce: when the honest recommendation changes the project 

After examining the technical debt, the consultants at Anchor Group laid out paths to address the problems on SuiteCommerce Advanced and an alternative. David concluded that Witmer would need to reimplement SuiteCommerce Advanced from scratch to get it right. But, when the team weighed the cost of SuiteCommerce implementation against its size and complexity, it chose to rebuild on BigCommerce instead. (Anchor Group did not perform that later BigCommerce implementation.)

“You guys consulted your way out of a lot of money,” David told Caleb Schmitz.  

Yes, we sure did.  

But at Anchor Group we’re people over profits, meaning we’ll give our clients the recommendation we believe is right, even if it means no additional implementation or project work for us.

So, Witmer hired a different firm for the BigCommerce project. But they soon realized that their new partner firm’s claimed NetSuite experience did not include the specific NetSuite–BigCommerce integration expertise Witmer needed. (Moral of the story for anyone choosing a NetSuite ecommerce partner: verify experience with the actual ERP and storefront solution combination.) In a NetSuite ecommerce integration, the ERP is the source of truth, and the connection can be the hardest part of the job.

Would David recommend Anchor for SuiteCommerce support? “Absolutely,” he said, calling Anchor “one of the best consulting groups that I have worked with.”

If your SuiteCommerce site is hard to maintain, we got you. Give us a holler and we’ll look under the hood and map the next sensible step.