The Electrical Counter

Equinox ERP Integration

The Electrical Counter use Equinox as their Warehouse Management System. Which required us to facilitate 2 data syncs between Adobe Commerce and Equinox.

Firstly, orders from the Adobe Commerce site would need to be synced to Equinox in a predefined format that Equinox could use to import the data.

Secondly, stock updates would be frequently sent from Equinox to Adobe Commerce to keep the website up to date with stock that had been sold offline.

Bespoke Trustpilot Review

The Electrical Counter required the replication of an existing piece of functionality from their previous site that automatically sent out review emails to customers that had previously placed orders. Through an import they would be able to pause and/or remove customer review notifications from the review queue.

Google Product Feed Date

The previous The Electrical Counter website had a comprehensive Google feed that it uploaded to Google Merchant center over night.

Clearance Stock and Quantities

The client required some bespoke functionality to be written which would handle a special price that can be applied when a product is marked as “clearance”.
This functionality would allow an admin to set a clearance price on a product and a corresponding clearance quantity. The clearance quantity would be the maximum amount of clearance stock that could be added to the cart by a customer. When clearance stock was added to the cart it would be added with the clearance price. Any further stock added to the cart would be added with the normal price if applicable.

This functionality concerns a complex section of the Adobe Commerce codebase. We performed significant research into which areas of the cart process could be extended in order to cover the following scenarios:

• 
  Add to cart on the PDP
• 
  Add to cart on a PLP
• Add to cart in the search result page
• Add to cart from a wish list
  update quantity in the minicart
• Remove item in the minicart
• Update quantity in the cart
• Remove item in the cart

After some extensive searching for a 3rd party solution proved fruitless, we instead scoped the build of a bespoke module. Once approved were able to locate a suitable section that would cover all of the above events where we could inject the required information to then process the clearance product logic.

Scheduled Special Prices

Prices on the Adobe Commerce site would need to be updated periodically when new special price lists were made available. The client required the ability to schedule the importing of special prices.

Adobe Commerce has scheduled update functionality that allows an admin to set product changes and the dates that they will be applied. However this can only be done in the admin on individual products. There is no import for the scheduled product update functionality.

There is also a similarly named scheduled import/export in Adobe Commerce. Which does allow automatic imports of data to be run. However this doesn’t allow the client to import data on a specific date, it can only do recurring imports, i.e: every day, week, month etc.

The community version of Magento actually provides special price to and from date fields. However, Adobe Commerce removes these so they don’t interfere with the Scheduled updates.

We wrote a module to enable the community special price to/from fields again in a way that wouldn’t break the scheduled product update functionality. This allowed the client to import their special price date ranges through the core importer. We also configured a 3rd party price importer to allow them to schedule the imports for a specific date.

Fastly SEO Redirects

Due to the 100K+ catalog, there were considerable SEO implications when migrating to Adobe Commerce from their previous eCommerce system. The previous site’s URLs were not replicable in terms of format in Adobe Commerce and regardless needed changing to a more SEO friendly format as the previous format was not ideal in terms of readability or control of keyword placement. This meant that there were 100K+ redirects required if we were to provide a one-to-one redirect for every active product and page on the site.

This amount of redirection could cause considerable performance issues. To preserve performance we’d upload the redirects into the Fastly CDN. A caveat of this however is there is a hard limit to the size of the Fastly VCL file. Meaning a limited number of redirects could be uploaded (approx 2.5MB). Hashing the extremely lengthy URLs of the previous site helped reduce the size of data we’d upload. Nevertheless we were still limited to approximately 15,000 one-to-one URLs.

The solution to this was for the SEO value of the existing site URLs to be ranked and only the top products would be given a one-to-one redirect. For the remaining URLs we generated regex rules to redirect groups of related URLs to common destinations on the new site.