La Tienda del Apicultor is a Spanish e-commerce company specializing in beekeeping equipment: hives, extraction tools, protective clothing, bee health products, and honey packaging. Selling online across Europe from its warehouse in Xeresa, Valencia, with a storefront in six languages, the company serves a large base of B2B customers: beekeepers and cooperatives across France, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, and Germany.
For every one of its intra-EU B2B deliveries, La Tienda del Apicultor is legally required to collect a signed Certificate of Entry: proof that goods arrived in the customer's country, needed to justify the 0% VAT exemption under Article 45a of EU Regulation 282/2011. With around 120 such deliveries a month, that’s not a minor task, and for a while, it was one of the company’s biggest administrative headaches, with a backlog of missing certificates building up under its previous tools. After switching to Signify, the company cleared that backlog in about ten days, at a rate of 60 certificates a day.
"Signify turned a compliance chore we kept postponing into something that just happens every morning at 6:30, in the customer's language, and lands on the invoice without anyone touching it."
Results at a glance
The Challenge
Before Signify, La Tienda del Apicultor had already tried two e-signature tools: GrabSign in 2024, then DocuSign in 2025. Both required the same manual routine: someone in administration would create an envelope by hand, look up the customer's details, upload the PDF, place the signature fields, send it, and later download and file the signed copy against the invoice. Every document went out in English, with no follow-up.
At a volume of roughly 120 intra-EU deliveries a month, a ten-minute task that generates no revenue is the first thing a small team lets slip. Certificates were requested late, or not at all. Customers didn't always understand what they were signing (one supplier even asked why they were receiving a DocuSign). Documents expired quietly in the background, and nobody had a clear view of which deliveries were actually covered. On top of that, neither previous tool offered a realistic way to connect to the company's ERP, so every certificate stayed a manual, one-off task.
The Solution
For Joshua Ivars, who also owns the company's internal tooling, the deciding factor was Signify's REST API. The combination of create-document and set-document-details gave his team full control over recipients, fields, reminders, and expiry, while the link-based recipient type meant signing links could be sent from the company's own mailbox, in its own words and language, rather than a third-party inbox.
Status polling and the download endpoints for the signed file and audit trail made it possible to close the loop automatically, and webhooks meant a Slack notification would fire the moment a document was completed or rejected. Pre-filled, read-only fields, like an auto-filled signing date, reduced the certificate to a single action for the customer: sign. Before the full integration was built, templates and bulk sending were used to work through the first batches manually.
Implementation
Today, the process runs unattended. Every morning, a job reads the day's intra-EU delivery notes from the ERP and generates a localized Certificate of Entry, in French, Portuguese, Italian, German, or English depending on the customer, listing the goods delivered. The certificate is created in Signify, the signing link is sent, and its status is tracked automatically. Once signed, both the signed PDF and the audit trail are downloaded and attached directly to the sales invoice in the ERP.
The same setup now also handles employment documents, supplier and licensing agreements, GDPR data-processing contracts with contractors, and occupational-safety coordination forms, extending well beyond the original compliance use case.
When the switch was made, the backlog accumulated under the previous tools was cleared in about ten days, at a rate of 60 certificates a day.
The Results
The impact showed up immediately in the team's calendar: roughly 15 to 20 hours of administrative work a month simply disappeared. Nobody creates, sends, chases, downloads, or files a certificate by hand anymore. The only human touch left is a two-minute glance at a daily Slack summary.
Volume has grown steadily. In a typical month, La Tienda del Apicultor now sends 60 to 100 documents through Signify; in August 2026, while catching up on a backlog, that number reached 581 in a single month. In the first six months on Signify, the company has sent over 1,000 documents, covering more than 1,000 deliveries.
Customers respond fast, too: certificates are signed in an average of 1.7 days, with 62% signed within 24 hours and 78% within three days. Each signed certificate, along with its full audit trail, lands on the correct invoice in the ERP automatically: exactly the kind of evidence a tax inspection asks for.
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