QC Supply Case Study – Magento to Shopify Migration

B2B / B2C Shopify

Website: https://www.qcsupply.com

Background

QC Supply provides products and services to farmers and homesteaders across the United States for over 40 years.   Their current ecommerce platform was based on Magento and had many problems.  Their Magento website was based on an aging platform and they needed a modern solution.  QC Supply approached Ecommerce Partners after one of their partners, Network Doctors, a top managed IT support company, referred them to find a solution that will modernize their website and set them up for the next 40 years.

Problems:

• Magento ongoing maintenance was very costly
• Making simple changes to the site took a long tim to complete
• Code deployment involved a manual process and disabled the site for hours at a time
• Pagespeed was slow (33/36)
• Website lacked auto-scaling for high demand periods
• Load balancing was not working properly
• No standby or backup systems in case of failure
• Frontend security issues existed which made the site vulnerable to attack
• ERP integration was not efficient.  Products had to manually be entered into Magento and many updates were not automated.
• Database and PHP version were out of date

Solution

ECP’s first task was to gather all requirements for QC’s website business in order to recommend a platform that will work best for them.  They conducted extensive interviews with each department to make sure that all stakeholders were taken into account when making their recommendation.  There were many requirements to take into account, including heavily customized ERP integrations, ease of use, user and staff permissions, scalability, security, comprehensive API needs, website speed, complicated shipping quoting, complex tax  and extensive B2B functionality.

Ecommerce Partners recommended the Shopify Plus platform because it has built in B2B functionality and integrates easily with most third party software companies.  Shopify is easier to work with than other platforms which makes development time faster and cheaper.  Shopify has the best built-in user experience of any ecommerce platform and introduces improvements faster and more often than any other platform on the market.

The development process was divided into two phases in an effort to quickly stand up a brand new site and user experience.  Together with QC Supply, Ecommerce Partners divided all tasks into a prioritized list and got to work.  

ECP delivered a fast (Google Pagespeed 77 mobile / 94 desktop), ADA Compliant B2B and B2C Shopify website with a dedicated B2B Pro Portal that allows admin users to create locations, sub users and permission based product purchasing using Shopify Companies, Catalogs and Location functionality.