Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
How to Achieve a Smooth Transition When Upgrading to Magento Commerce
Rick Johnson President and CEO of Kadro Prepare for the Future with Magento Commerce
Building a new eCommerce site from scratch, whether you’re a startup or an existing business, is a significant challenge. You understand the journey, you’ve lived it.
But your journey isn’t over. As your business This paper identifies the best practices changes and grows, you’ll need more from and guidelines for upgrading to Magento your online storefront, including more Commerce without disrupting your existing features, functionality, and flexibility. If you’re business. It includes several examples of running your digital business on an older or businesses which retained key features and inflexible set of technologies, it may be time to functions from their old sites — we call this upgrade to Magento Commerce. functional parity — while gaining all the benefits of Magento Commerce. Magento Commerce is more than an eCommerce platform. It is a robust, scalable software framework which software developers can easily customize, making it the perfect digital commerce solution.
However, replacing your commerce platform Magento Commerce is can be a daunting proposition, especially when more than an eCommerce you’re running a high-volume commerce business. A website shutdown or lengthy platform. It is a robust, business interruption could damage customer scalable software framework confidence and set your business back months. You may be wondering how you can which software developers transition to the advanced technology you can easily customize, need to power future growth while ensuring business continuity today. making it the perfect digital commerce solution.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 2 Make the Business Case for Magento Commerce
Very often, the business case for To convince your leadership team to invest in upgrading to Magento Commerce is Magento Commerce, you must quantify these potential benefits and if possible, show how based on the promise your online similar companies have achieved significant business will grow significantly, gains. At the same time, you need a plan for your average conversion rates will ensuring your new site will have all of the improve, and total cost of ownership custom features required to run your online will decrease. business.
These are all valid reasons for switching to Magento Commerce. They are a critical part of your business case if your existing eCommerce site is poorly implemented, missing key functionality for today’s eCommerce shopper, or has fallen substantially behind in usability and performance standards.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 3 Why Do You Need to Upgrade?
If you answer yes to any of the following questions, your business could probably benefit from switching to Magento Commerce.
Is your site falling behind Is the prospect of moving to in technology, features, a new eCommerce platform standards compliance, and daunting due to cost user experience capabilities? considerations or complexity?
You need to consider total cost Too often we hear from our clients of ownership of your current a prior attempt to replace their eCommerce solution including existing eCommerce system failed. lost opportunities from not The techniques and best practices utilizing new technology, features, presented in this paper are and user experiences. One best essential to avoid a failed system practice to apply in this scenario replacement. is establishing the appropriate solution architecture to leverage what works best on your site, and how Magento Commerce can be best applied to fit your overall business plan. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing decision.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 4 Is your eCommerce site Are you worried about falling currently a “unique snowflake” behind your competition and which only a small number not providing the advanced of software developers experiences your customers understand? expect?
Fully custom solutions are often With advancements in AI difficult and expensive to replace. technology, evolving mobile Often, the quality of custom solutions like PWA, better systems degrades over time. The understanding customer brand power of Magento Commerce interactions, and different lies in its software framework. ways new generations of online Magento Commerce offers a shoppers are conducting rich eco-system of experienced transactions, your business developers and integrators. Best needs to stay at the forefront of practices around making sure eCommerce innovation to outpace your code and architecture are the competitions own capabilities. appropriate to current now and future needs are presented below.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 5 Has your online business grown to a level where your current processes are not working as well as they used to?
We will present several best practices and case studies to illustrate how clients with antiquated back-office systems determined what to leverage, what to replace, and how to apply Magento Commerce to bring new capabilities to their customers.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 6 Best Practices for a Successful Transition to Magento Commerce
Each of the individual projects highlighted in this paper shared a set of common keys to success to make sure the business and technical requirements were understood and adhered to during development. Each key to success is presented below as a set of best practices which will help transition your online business over to Magento Commerce.
Requirements Discovery
Understand Your Data
Right-Size Your Architecture
Know Where Custom Software is Needed
Plan User Acceptance Testing
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 7 Conduct a Detailed Requirements Discovery and Analysis Session
When a primary objective of the project is Stakeholders should represent each to maintain business functional parity, it is functional area of the business which will be essential to have a detailed understanding involved in using or interfacing with the new of the existing site’s features, functionality, site. Examples include product management, business rules, data models, systems customer management, order management, architecture, and 3rd-party system shipping and fulfillment, content dependencies. management, marketing, sales, customer service, merchandising, accounting, security, The first step in Kadro’s approach is to always information systems, marketplaces, etc. conduct a detailed requirements discovery session with all stakeholders in the project. The requirements discovery process should This typically involves a detailed Q&A session focus on identifying which functionality stays with each stakeholder and supporting the same and what should change. Depending staff to make sure individual job on the overall budget of the project, replacing functions are understood. an existing eCommerce site can present
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 8 opportunities to make improvements to the your site’s key data structures for the product customer experience and the branding. It can catalog, customer accounts, and order also include enhancing the look of the site management. or adding new functionality your competitors During the analysis of the requirements, may not have yet. it is key to identify the gaps between what At the business-level, specific end-user Magento Commerce provides out-of-the- scenarios must be thoroughly documented. box, what can be achieved through Magento You will also need to map out the underlying extensions and Adobe technical partners, and business rules that govern how different types what elements will require customizations of data are used and managed. to meet business and technical needs. This analysis drives the scope of custom software At the systems level, all integration points, development effort which will be required. data sharing protocols and methods, your systems of record, and what systems to keep versus those to replace, must be identified. As part of this effort, you will need to document
If you and your developers don’t fully understand your requirements, you can’t
create the right solution for your business.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 9 Ensure Your Systems Integrator Fully Understands Your Data
Most eCommerce re-platform projects fail or Lastly, all the processes and scripts required end up costing too much because the site’s to convert data to the new site need to be data and the unique business rules governing identified and developed to ensure data the data are never fully grasped by the integrity and parity on the existing site. These development team. scripts are used to convert the data from the old site to the new site and may be reused to The requirements discovery process and convert data for test phases and the final go- analysis will focus on making sure developers live site cutover. and systems integrators have a fundamental knowledge of the site’s key data elements, The bottom line, the technical team building including those for the product catalog, the new eCommerce site must understand the customer accounts, and order management. data and all its nuances which make-up your The underlying business rules which govern eCommerce DNA. how this data is used and managed must be well understood.
The source of data, how it is shared or integrated with the new site, and how said data fits within the underlying Magento data models is essential. Understanding how the The bottom line, the data fits within Magento’s various data models is also a key driver for the scope of custom technical team building the software development effort that will be new eCommerce site must required. understand the data and all its nuances which make-up your eCommerce DNA.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 10 Right-Size the Code Base and the System Architecture
As a general rule in software development, Through the detailed requirements discovery having more source code means more code to process and analysis previously mentioned, all maintain and support. the external systems, APIs, and data sharing points must be identified and well understood. When developing a new eCommerce site You should also have extensive knowledge of on Magento Commerce, you must carefully how these systems and their interfaces will evaluate all third-party extensions. For work together with Magento Commerce. example, it makes no sense to add an extension with 500 lines of code to the You must also carefully evaluate any general- checkout versus achieving the same purpose purpose middleware bridge and connector by implementing 10 lines of custom code. solutions you may use to integrate third-party Far too often we see eCommerce sites systems with Magento Commerce. They may bloated with extension code which can lead to promise a faster-to-market development maintenance headaches down the road. life cycle, but tradeoffs may include poor performance or other limitations to scale. Likewise, when migrating or porting code from an old site to a new site to achieve Sometimes existing systems used by the functional parity, you must take care each old eCommerce site may be repurposed to module is properly implemented in the new accommodate the new Magento Commerce site’s architecture and data models. You site. This can include taking pieces of your old should attempt to minimize the number of site or other legacy systems and integrating modules you create. Each new system in them with Magento Commerce to establish the architecture means more integration integration points for managing orders, points, points to monitor for failures, points to products, customers, data feeds, or other optimize for performance, added QA testing, external systems. and likely higher total cost of ownership.
Be smart when adding extensions and middleware - more code and more components in the architecture may lead to more headaches and higher support costs.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 11 Rigorously Identify and Define Where Custom Software is Required
Developing and testing custom software for practice to further define your business and your new Magento Commerce site will be one technical requirements, how and where the of the costliest and most time-consuming customization will fit within the Magento aspects of your project. In Magento platform, and what elements of Magento will Commerce, all new features you need are be extended. added either by a third-party extension or by When third-party elements are involved, creating a custom software extension. Your it is important to identify if a pre-existing site’s custom software development areas will extension will be used or whether custom be determined from the following: web service APIs or other data sharing › The gap analysis from the mechanisms will be used and how. requirements discovery. For areas involving messaging and state- › Full understanding of the site’s data machine behavior with external systems, you and business rules and how these fit within Magento core. should use tools such as message sequence charts to illustrate system interaction and › Identify custom features from the message flows to document the required existing site and how they will be system behavior, timings, and dependencies. replicated in Magento Commerce.
› How and where in Magento Commerce will data, messaging, and functionality from third-party systems be integrated?
The good news is Magento Commerce provides a robust software framework which Most of your project cost will be allows software engineers to extend the in meeting custom requirements. platform specifically to each business’s needs. Make good decisions to get it right
For each system area requiring custom and mitigate risks. software development efforts, it is a key best
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 12 Carefully Plan User Acceptance Testing and Deployment to Ease Your Go-Live Stress
As previously noted, replacing an existing To mitigate risks in replacing too much of an eCommerce platform with a new one is existing system, consider a development and challenging. Some businesses find it very deployment plan where significant elements difficult to know when the new site is ready of the new eCommerce system are tested and to go live. For very large systems, testing delivered incrementally in phases. can last a significantly long time, teams can get frustrated, and costs rise for everyone involved. A well-defined user acceptance testing plan can provide clarity to all your stakeholders, preventing a costly and protracted testing phase. › Have a well-defined User
We suggest developing your user acceptance Acceptance Testing plan testing plans, test cases, and go-live criteria long before testing is scheduled to begin. › Include all stakeholders in Work closely with stakeholders – including creating your overall test those involved with third-party systems which plan will integrate with Magento Commerce. Crafting a plan which works for everyone is › Clearly define all especially important if your existing site is pre-deployment and highly custom. deployment tasks - and do rehearsals. You should also clearly communicate pre- deployment, deployment, and rollback plans › Consider incremental with all your stakeholders, rehearsing them at phases to mitigate risks to least once. your existing systems
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 13 Real-World Examples
In this section, we cover how three fast-growing businesses transitioned to Magento Commerce while still retaining key features and functions from their custom systems. Each case study details which capabilities were migrated to Magento Commerce.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 14 Case Study Summary REEDS Jewelers
B2C eCommerce – migration from proprietary Java J2EE solution to Magento Commerce
Site: REEDS.com
About REEDS Jewelers
Founded in 1946, REEDS Jewelers of Wilmington NC is a full-service omnichannel retailer with an online presence and stores in 18 states. REEDS offers fine jewelry, designer jewelry, and watches including David Yurman, Michael Kors, Pandora, Alex & Ani, Tacori, TAG Heuer, and Rolex. REEDS Jewelers has worked with Kadro on their eCommerce solution since 2001.
Primary Objective
Prior to adopting Magento Commerce, REEDS.com operated on a proprietary custom eCommerce solution built by Kadro. Over time, as REEDS Jewelers’ eCommerce business grew, they required a commercial Key Features and Capabilities eCommerce platform to reduce their Migrated to Magento Commerce dependency on a proprietary custom solution. › The branding and mobile responsive REEDS Jewelers selected Magento Commerce web design of the existing site to be to build the solution they required. Achieving retained and implemented in the new functional parity with their existing custom Magento site’s theme. REEDS’ prior solution was essential and critical to the investments in UI/UX design to be fully project’s success. leveraged for the new site.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 15 › REEDS Jeweler’s product catalog watches integrated dynamically with data model is complex. Key features product detail pages to guide the were needed to handle multi-faceted buying decision. product attributes, fulfillment types, brand types, dynamic product options Key Changes to the Site Resulting such as engravings, dynamic product add-ons such as resizing and warranty from the Magento Commerce plans, and custom configurations. Project
› All payment methods supported from › The final system architecture custom site including major credit used a strategy to evolve the cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Affirm, order management and product Bitcoin, REEDS Gift Card, and REEDS management features of their prior private label credit card. custom solution into a separate order management system (OMS) › Product search and recommendations and product integration management using Reflektion site search solution. (PIM) solution. The custom OMS/PIM › Order Management System for was then integrated with Magento managing the entire order workflow, Commerce, leveraging all pre-existing editing orders, and taking phone- back-office integrations and achieving assisted orders. functional parity with how managing products, orders, and customers are › Integration with back-office IBM performed. This significantly reduced AS/400 ERP system and POS system total cost and overall project risk. including store-level inventory, product pricing, and promotions, and › To achieve site performance EDI for drop-shippers. requirements for page-load of dynamic category pages and layered › Ability for sales associates in retail navigation on REEDS.com, Kadro stores to place online orders for worked with Reflektion to fully customers in-store. integrate their product catalog search, › Centralized warehouse fulfillment, in- preview search, and category pages. store fulfillment, and store associate › A new credit card payment gateway facilitated sales/fulfillment. service was integrated to improve PCI- › Product and content update triggers to compliance. Akamai CDN.
› Support for product education content and glossary terms for jewelry and
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 16 The Results
› Functional parity with the features, functionality, data, and UI/UX of the highly custom site was achieved with the Magento Commerce implementation.
› Not all technology had to be re-written or replaced. The new system architecture leveraged many existing components by re-engineering them into separate OMS and PIM components.
System Architecture
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 17 Case Study Summary LCI
B2B eCommerce – migration from custom ASP/.Net solution to Magento Commerce
Sites: www.buylci.com, www.lcidistribution.com, www.tacticalassaultgearstore.com
About LCI
LCI is an NIB-affiliated, not-for-profit corporation providing products and services to the US Government. Operating under the auspices of the AbilityOne program, LCI has grown and diversified for over 80 years Primary Objectives to become one of the largest employers of people who are blind or visually impaired in › Move all LCI eCommerce sites from a the United States. custom ASP/.Net implementation to Magento Commerce with LCI operates multiple distribution centers, Microsoft Dynamics AX. eCommerce websites, retail stores, and › Upgrade the Microsoft Dynamics AX manufacturing facilities within the United system. States. Through their three eCommerce websites, they sell office supplies, office › Allow B2B customers to see all their orders online. equipment, furniture, industrial supplies, and tactical assault gear to government and › Streamline the administration of military buyers. multiple websites.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 18 Key Features and Capabilities restricted and unrestricted products.
Migrated to Magento Commerce › Customers on a subset of the websites purchase via a contractual price › Integration with Microsoft Dynamics book. The rules Magento uses to give AX for all product feeds, category customers the lowest price had to be feeds, inventory, pricing, orders, overwritten to support specific pricing shipping, and fulfillment. This includes by customer group. products and categories sourced by a third-party distributor and fulfillment › Microsoft Dynamics eCommerce partners. pricing engine supported real-time lookup of three-tier pricing tier (base › LCI’s existing branding and graphical + price book + contract pricing) which design were to be maintained for needed to be converted to the two-tier the new site. Kadro used Magento’s model supported by Magento (base + built-in mobile responsive web theme, customer group). Luma, to ensure the site leveraged all built-in Magento templates and › EDI orders and phone assisted orders achieved branding and graphic design processed through Microsoft Dynamics consistency with existing sites. AX are fed to Magento Commerce so customers can have a complete › Cancels, Returns, and Exchanges are omnichannel experience for reviewing handled within Microsoft Dynamics AX order status and invoice history. and required integration with Magento Commerce for importing return › Multi-site support from Magento orders. Commerce enables LCI to operate and manage all three eCommerce sites › Tiered table-based shipping rates under one administrative control and and carrier-based shipping rates hosting environment. – depending on specific business rules – were required for the Magento Commerce site.
› Specific business rules for two- tier and three-tier purchase order flow must be applied to Magento Commerce’s B2B workflow process.
› Some products are only available to purchase by specific customer groups. A single category will contain
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 19 The Results
› LCI, Kadro, and LCI’s integration › Leveraging Magento partner for Microsoft Dynamics Commerce’s B2B feature set worked together to achieve the was key to meeting the project’s objectives of the project. The risks requirements. and challenges to the project › All features and functionality that were significant, considering LCI relied on with their custom both the eCommerce system and ASP/.Net sites were preserved or supporting ERP system were replaced with functionality in their being changed in tandem. new Magento Commerce site.
System Architecture
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 20 Case Study National Wholesale
B2C eCommerce – migration from Magento 1 to Magento Commerce Cloud
Site: www.shopnational.com
About National Wholesale
Established in 1952, National Wholesale is a family-owned and operated business specializing in women’s clothing and fashion accessories. They operate a traditional mail- order catalog and an online business. platforms code architecture. All prior Magento Commerce 1 customizations, Primary Objectives including the IBM AS/400 back-office integration, had to be migrated to
Having migrated their eCommerce site from a Magento Commerce 2. home-grown solution to Magento Commerce › National Wholesale needed a fully 1 back in 2016, National Wholesale set the managed hosted solution with following objectives for their move to Magento Magento Commerce cloud to improve Commerce 2: uptime and site performance.
› The move to Magento Commerce 1 Key Features and Capabilities didn’t achieve functional parity to their home-grown site. Therefore, Migrated to Magento Commerce they needed to recover functionality › Reorganization of the product data previously lost. attributes allowed National Wholesale › The move from Magento Commerce to restore previously lost functionality 1 to Magento Commerce 2 is a of configurable products containing platform replacement because of the combinations of clearance and fundamental differences between both full retail simples under a single
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 21 configurable style. It also permitted › The pricing feed was previously users to place individual sizes within implemented with a third-party a style/color on clearance without extension and did not support selecting the entire style/color discounting down to specific combination. size/color/style. The extension was replaced with a custom › Replaced the existing product implementation that accepted the integration which used a custom PIM same format but correctly handled the and third-party Magento extension to pricing variations. completely replace the product catalog daily. The original Magento Commerce › A new product onboarding process 1 implementation caused daily system was created in Magento Commerce to downtime, excessive indexing, and was eliminate errors with launching new error-prone. products while providing an overview of products being prepared for the › Enhanced the inventory process website. to increase its frequency and send additional relevant data which was › National Wholesale wanted to previously lost in the migration maintain their existing custom to Magento Commerce 1. The old connector for managing product, process could not handle providing inventory, pricing, orders, and customers with expected ship dates fulfillment in selling their products on on back-ordered products and was the Amazon marketplace. executed infrequently as it caused a › Magento Commerce customizations full system re-index. The new design were used to dramatically improve delivers rapid inventory updates with swatch performance on category no system downtime, improving the pages while supporting quantity customer experience by providing discounts across varied priced simple expected ship date information products under a single configurable. through the cart. › Product search and recommendations › The orders feed was previously were improved in utilizing the implemented with a third-party Reflektion search solution. extension and was missing key elements which would have required › A new credit card payment gateway additional customization. In lieu of was integrated for improved PCI- a rewrite of an extension, the order compliant solution. export was custom-written to match the previous output with the omitted data now included.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 22 The Results
› The Magento Commerce implementation achieved functional parity with the features, functionality, data, and UI/UX of the Magento 1 site, as well as bringing forward custom features previously missed when migrating from their former custom solution.
› All integration points with the IBM AS/400 back-office successfully implemented.
› Magento’s cloud solution is used for improved site reliability and performance.
› Shopnational.com was named top Women’s Fashion (single brand) eCommerce website by Newsweek for the Newsweek 2020 Best Online Shops.
System Architecture
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 23 Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Moving a high-performing eCommerce site to a new digital commerce platform is a considerable challenge. These best practices can help you plan and execute a smooth transition from your existing platform to Magento Commerce:
› Perform a detailed discovery and analysis of business and technical requirements from all stakeholders.
› Assemble a software engineering team that fully understands your site’s requirements, the data that represents all aspects of your site, and all the business rules needed to make it run your business and serve your customers.
› Make sure you think through how to leverage, reuse, migrate from, or integrate with the custom systems you already have in place.
› Rigorously identify and define the custom software required for your complete solution.
› Carefully plan user acceptance testing, criteria for cut-over, and your rehearsed deployment plan to eliminate go-live stress and anxiety.
Remember, Magento Commerce is more than an eCommerce platform. It is a robust software framework for building custom solutions to meet your specific needs and ensuring all the features and functionality you need are achievable.
Learn More
To learn more about upgrading to Magento Commerce, please visit www.magento.com.
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 24 About Kadro
Founded in 2001 in Raleigh, N.C., Kadro is a software engineering firm that delivers B2C and B2B eCommerce solutions on Magento Commerce. Kadro provides enterprise-class software development and integration services to develop eCommerce sites for retailers, distributors and wholesalers across many industries and markets. Learn more at www.kadro.com.
Contact Follow Us on Social Media
Ariel Mordetsky linkedin LinkedIn kadro-solutions Vice President of Revenue twitter Twitter @kadro (877) 435-3453 instagram Instagram @kadroinc [email protected] facebook Facebook KadroSolutions
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 25 About Magento Commerce
Magento Commerce, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, is the leading commerce solution for merchants and brands across B2C and B2B industries and was recently named a leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. Magento Commerce boasts a strong portfolio of cloud-based omnichannel solutions that empower merchants to successfully integrate digital and physical shopping experiences.
Magento is the #1 provider to the Internet Retailer Top 1000, the B2B 300 and the Top 500 Guides for Europe and Latin America. Magento is supported by a vast global network of solution and technology partners, a highly active global developer community and the largest eCommerce marketplace for extensions available for download on the Magento Marketplace. More information can be found at Magento.com.
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