Bringing back a legacy B2B ecommerce business from the brink of stagnation

The Discovery

We've inherited the project from another junior development team who bit off more than they could chew. We ended up picking up the pieces and putting together a roadmap to get the build over the finish line. The whole project spanned from May 2021 to April 2022.

The main challenge was to learn and understand Convectronics' products and the customers. These were not some simple apparel or typical consumer products; the products Convectronics manufactures require an understanding of electrical engineering, manufacturing, and mathematics that you don't typically see in the wild. The typical customer has a degree of understanding in engineering and is looking for precision for their applications.

The Data

Taking the time to understand Convectronics' products and business, we've compiled a list of all pages, resources, and products to begin extraction of technical information from AutoCAD diagrams and PDFs into editable pages. There was no way to automate this process, and attention to detail was critical, as 0.01 and 0.001 make an astronomical difference to an engineer.

To keep things simple, we stood up a production instance in parallel to the legacy production website while we worked behind the scenes, page by page, product by product, bringing the legacy site to modern ecommerce capabilities.

A number of important areas needed to be kept in mind while going through the process:

• Did our input data match the data in the PDF catalogue?
• Was the information effectively presented across all devices including print?
• Are pages Search Engine Optimized, and ADA compliant?

A simple Google Sheet allowed both teams to keep track of each of the critical points for each of the pages and products. In the end, we completed our milestone of migrating all content and products to the Magento platform; a tedious and time-consuming task nonetheless, but it was worth the effort and the finished result.

The Redesign

One of the challenges Convectronics team faced is the ability to create and manage content. In this case, Magento Page Builder delivered. Instead of focusing on the intricacies of development, wireframes, and mockups, the teams were able to quickly build a new homepage and other content pages through a drag-and-drop grid/row/column approach bypassing the traditional design, development, and delivery lifecycle. This in turn freed up time for us to focus on truly unique, and custom features of business requirements.

Next To Come

Our next task at hand is converting all complex products, such as this Standard RTD Temperature Sensor below, into Configurable Product types to allow users to select an exponential number of variations and configuration options. This will generate unique part numbers and visual schematics based on user input and selected values. This project is a work in progress, and once complete, it will make Convectronics stand out from the competition.

Credits

Credits go out to the X2Y Dev Team, Leslie, and Patti from Convectronics for this collaborative effort to transform the Convectronics.com online presence into an online business. A shout-out to our friends at Trellis.co team for a successful partnership referral.

Summary

Convectronics, a traditional heating element manufacturer, faced a challenging transition from paper catalogs and a static website to a modern ecommerce platform. The project involved meticulous data extraction, careful migration to Magento, and the implementation of Magento Page Builder for efficient content creation. Notable improvements included enhanced navigation, quoting, and dynamic distribution options. The introduction of custom tools, like "The Calculator" added practical value to the user experience. The successful collaboration between the X2Y Dev Team and Convectronics, reinvigorated Convectronics' online presence, positioning them for growth and innovation in the competitive market, with a dynamic ecommerce platform reflecting the precision of their products.