One of the biggest challenges in developing eCommerce solutions is balancing consistency and flexibility. Our latest case study demonstrates this.
Travis Sitzlar faced this when a client required a platform with an extreme degree of personalization. He tackled the challenge with the help of CreativeMinds’ Magento Multi-Vendor Marketplace, Magento Multi-User, and customization service.
Sitzlar is a Managing Partner of Intellam, which provides technological solutions to small-to-midsized businesses.
One of his clients was moving from a legacy, in-house Ecommerce platform to Magento, integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Such work can usually be handled in-house, but the project’s specifications were especially particular.
Stephanie and Travis Sitzlar
The Trouble: Extreme Personalization
Sitzlar remembers that the project had many challenging aspects: “The entire Magento product catalog, price lists, even back-end vendor fulfillment and delivery dates are 100% custom to each of our client’s customers”.
Meaning that, in practice, no two customers see the same products, categories, or prices.
To further complicate matters, the orders can be enormous, each including hundreds of line items and thousands of units. “It takes personalization to a whole new level.”
Travis and his team soon realized that creating solutions from zero and meeting the requirements solely with in-house development would take too much time and resources. The project was simply too complex.
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The Plan: Seeking a Partner With Expertise
“We needed to start at a known entity – transforming Magento into a B2B model that could be further customized to meet the more unique aspects of our client’s model.”
So they began searching for a partner who could provide both the existing B2B solution and customization support.
It was an arduous and meticulous process, Sitzlar recalls: “We implemented, tested, and did a code review for every single B2B solution on the market before selecting CreativeMinds’ Multi-Vendor Marketplace.”
He mentions feeling disappointed with extensions that had polished marketing material and well-trained sales staff, but poor implementation: “Once you really got into the meat of the solution, you would find it was a house of cards.”
The inverse situation also happened: “Others were well implemented, but we just didn’t come away from our discussions feeling good about their ability to handle the level of customizations we would ultimately need.”
In the end, Intellam found a perfect balance in CreativeMinds’ portfolio. “CreativeMinds checked all of the boxes,” Sitzlar says.
The Solution: Magento Marketplace, Magento Multi-User, and Extensive Customization
By the end of 2016, Intellam had acquired licenses for Magento Multi-Vendor Marketplace and Magento Multi-User, as well as recurring monthly support hours. This partnership included custom development work on both extensions to fit Intellam’s need. And the partnership continues strong one year later.
Sitzlar says he’s enthusiastic about the quality of the service: “It’s been fantastic, unbelievable across all fronts. Not only for delivering according to our requirements, but also on occasion spotting some requirement or consequence of a change that we missed during our own scoping and prototyping.”
He adds that one of the selling points of this support is that it goes beyond the simple problem solving: “CreativeMinds has also been extremely valuable in helping us think through ways to approach particularly complicated aspects of the project.”
The partnership is so fruitful that he saw the challenge with renewed eyes: “We’ve enjoyed working with CreativeMinds so much that we are already looking forward to our next crazy project just so we can continue with them,” says Sitzlar.
