From Legacy to Modern eCommerce

Read Time: 5 - 10 minutes

Identify two to five key problems.
Why do they exist?
How do they impact the organization?
Who is responsible for them?

Problems:

• Static website, performing updates is difficult and time consuming.
• Customers are unable to configure and purchase products online.
• Must be a repository of information for engineers and manufacturers.
• Retain and improve SEO ranking through the migration.

We had an interesting challenge on our hands; Convectronics, a US business founded in 1985 focused on manufacturing custom flameless and tubular heating elements, temperature sensors, thermocouples & RTDs, and the software and programming needed to control heating and temperature control processes. These elements are critical components of our everyday life to which we pay little to no attention, but are responsible for the cars we drive, the heating of our homes, or the cups we drink our morning coffee on the way to work.

Our teams didn't have much to go off on -- a static legacy website, and a PDF document used to publish a paper catalogue to distribute to vendors and customers. This was an old-school business, customers would read the paper catalogue, pencil in the specifications, and call up Convectronics to place their order. As you can imagine, not a scalable process.

We've inherited the project from another junior development team who bit off more than they can 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 challange was to learn and understand Convectronics products and the customer. These were not some simple apparel or typical consumer products, the products Convectronics manufacturers require understanding of electrical engineering, manufacturing, and mathmatics that you don't typically see in the wild. The typical customer has a degree of understanding in engineering, and are looking for percision for their applications.

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 diagams, PDFs into editable pages. There was no way to automate this process, and attention to detail was critical as 0.01 and 0.001 is 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 bring 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 none the less, but it was worth the effort and the finished result.

One such unique requirement was to build "The Calculator" to help users quickly calculate Ohms, Pressure, Power Flowrate, various resistances, and phase units based on multiple variables of the application.

• Standard Flow Rate (SCFM)
• Power Flowrate (Used in calculating the electrical power, flow rate or temperature requirement)
• Temperature Conversion
• Ohms Law
• Pressure Conversion
• Three Phase Unit
• Single Phase Unit
• Parallel Resistance (Used in calculating the total resistance in ohms of resistors that are in parallel)
• Series Resistance (Used in calculating the resistance in ohms of resistors connected in series)

Each calculator was vetted by multiple Convectronics engineers to make sure it was ready for use. Props to Andrii Cherneha for developing this powerful tool.

You can play around with this calculator on convectronics.com, just look for this icon:

There were of course other areas that have been drastically improved over the legacy website such as navigation, search, category pages, quick quoting, dynamic distribution finder and checkout. Now that Convectronics is on Adobe Commerce, the possibilities are endless and our focus at X2Y continues to be on improving user experience, feature development, implementation of business requirements, and overall continuing to add value to Convectronics.

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 which 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.

To order a 17” long, 3/16” diameter, St. Steel sheath, RTD Style Y, 3 wire, the part number is:

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.