A storefront bolted to the side of a website
A bolt-on storefront replaced by commerce built into the site. Industrial coatings and membranes sold to distributors and contractors. We inherited a half-finished rebuild and have run the platform ever since.
The problem
The site came to us mid-rebuild. The CMS was standing but largely empty, so the marketing team had been populating it themselves. Ecommerce ran on a separate hosted storefront bolted alongside it, connected to the ERP by a link that could not be relied on, which left the catalogue and the store as two systems pretending to be one. Customers hit it before anyone internally did: adding to cart punched out to a different domain with different branding, and there is no way to know how many of them assumed the site had been hijacked and closed the tab. Underneath all of that, hazardous products carry obligations a normal checkout ignores, and installation is exactly the thing contractors get wrong when a PDF is all they have.
What we built
- Took over the existing build, stabilised it, and got the content model working the way it had been promised
- Migrated commerce off the hosted platform and onto Craft Commerce, so the catalogue and the storefront share one system instead of syncing between two
- Rebuilt the ERP integration so fulfilment sees orders without manual entry
- Built cart-aware hazmat detection that fires only on the orders that need it, capturing registration and arbitration acknowledgement at the right moment
- Kept the ordering path unchanged for everything that isn’t regulated
Result
- One system, instead of a storefront bolted to a website
- Checkout stopped throwing shoppers onto a different-looking domain mid-purchase
- Compliance handled by the system rather than by a person remembering
- Years of continuous ownership covering maintenance, features and a platform migration, rather than a project that ended at launch
Automation running here
- Compliance that fires only when it mustHazmat obligations detected from cart contents, forcing registration and capturing acknowledgement only on the orders that actually require it. The rule is enforced by the system rather than remembered by a person.
What two systems cost you
The shopper has already decided to buy, and the page they land on looks like somebody else’s. Nobody can tell you how many closed the tab. That is the point.
Product data nobody can actually build on
The catalogue of record is a print document, a spreadsheet, and someone’s memory, and the three disagree. Nothing downstream can be better than the data underneath it, so the storefront, the search filters and the ERP all inherit the same mess.
Read the case →Orders nobody can price at checkout
A large share of your volume ships LTL, and nothing can be quoted until someone looks at the pallet. So the order gets taken by phone and typed in again, and the website quietly becomes a brochure.
Read the case →