Diagnosing the Symptoms: About the Project
The Just Health Shops team contacted Groove Commerce to help implement their ten, health-related eCommerce storefronts on Magento‘s Enterprise platform. From the start, both sides anticipated an equally challenging and exciting project. “We knew the multi-store functionality was there for a project of this scale, but laying the best foundation possible was absolutely critical to the long-term stability of a system powering this many stores,” stated Groove Commerce CEO, Ethan Giffin.
Based out of Ashton, Maryland, Just Health Shops is the owner, operator of several niche online stores that offer a variety of home health care products for all ages. An extensive product selection and thorough product details are two of the many facets that have been successful for the Just Health Shop organization. Just Health Shops’ content-rich stores had achieved valuable SEO positioning over the years, and maintaining those rankings would be a critical concern during the platform migration process.
Key Decision
“When we sat down to lay out this project plan, it was clear there were some decisions that we needed to work through with their internal site team to ensure this project go as smoothly as possible,” said Groove’s COO, PJ Gill.
One of the major points of discussion was that nine stores of the stores were doing solid business on the Community edition of Magento, while the tenth store was running on the Miva platform. After several conversations with Just Health Shops, we decided that migrating the stores from Magento’s Community to Enterprise would be the first step in this project.
“The success of this project is a credit to both companies’ determination and flexibility to navigate an extensive and complicated process to get to the ‘finish line’.”Because Just Health Shops had a talented internal site team, both companies worked together to compound resources and ensure a comfortable hand-off post-launch. Through their work with the data aspect of getting their information out of the community sites and reformatted for the Enterprise Platform, we were able to focus on the design, features, and functionality of the platform.
The Medicine: Design & Development
The second challenge was to create a template design that adhered to industry best practices and leveraged the platform in the best way possible, while still representing an individual aesthetic for each sub-brand.
“At the beginning, I wasn’t excited by the idea of a template design, but after executing it across the various sites, I appreciated the work that’s involved. It was about creating a visual system that said yes, this is a Just Health Shops store, but it is this specific store – nebulizers, walkers, oximeters, etc,”explained Groove’s Senior Designer, Heather Van De Mark.
Through this exercise, we were able to layout the foundation that would ultimately scale across all of these stores and identify areas where the stores could be given a unique element based on their brand.
On the development side this project was not only different because of the sale, but also because of how the sites would share functionality and features. “The key in this project, was understanding how decisions on one site could affect all of the other sites. Typically you’re working on one store at a time, but for this to be done correctly decisions had to be evaluated at a more macro level,” said Groove’s Lead Developer, Jason Young.
With almost twenty extensions powering unique features and functionality within the stores, it was important to consider how they would impact the front-end as well as interact with one another. The process of testing the site was an extensive joint effort between both Groove Commerce and Just Health Shops. It was a rigorous process, from a cross-browser standpoint, to ensure the extensions were operating correctly across all nine stores.
Breathing Easier: Lessons Learned
As we do for all ‘completed’ Groove projects, we sat down following the launch of the initial nine stores to examine the lessons learned on this interesting and complex project, and to use those insights in our continued efforts to help all our clients on the Magento Platform.
The first lesson, the path of upgrading from Community to Enterprise would probably fall under Robert Frost’s description of “the road less traveled.” With a very distinct code base and a lot more features and functionality, the transition to Enterprise can be as unique as if you were coming from a completely different platform.
The next lesson was digging into the integrity of the “Enterprise Extensions.” Aside from a bigger price tag, it was interesting to look under the hood of these open source extensions and find the amount of work left to do after purchase. Depending on the extension’s functionality, there was significant development to strategically use these in a way that would compliment Just Health Shops’ overall strategy.
However, the most exciting lesson was learning just how powerful Magento’s multi-store functionality is. To see the way this system now handles these nine stores, and the way their largest store will easily add on in the future, really tested and proved the power of the platform.
“This project was just like building a custom home. There was a plan in place but things changed within the architecture as we got in and laid the foundation. The success of this project is a credit to both companies’ determination and flexibility to navigate an extensive and complicated process to get to the ‘finish line.’” Said CEO Ethan Giffin.
