Doheny’s
Consumer and Commercial Supplier of Pool Supplies and Equipment on Magento Commerce
Solution B2B eCommerce, B2C eCommerce
Platform Magento 2
Overview
Founded in 1967, Doheny’s is a leading provider and supplier of swimming pool and spa equipment and supplies in the United States. With eight regional warehouses, Doheny’s provides fast one-day delivery for almost everyone. In addition to the Doheny’s brand of products, Doheny’s offers equipment and supplies from all major pool and spa product manufacturers.
The Doheny’s website sells both direct to consumers as well as commercial buyers for above ground, inground, and spas including pools, chemicals, supplies, equipment, accessories, safety products, and parts. This requires their eCommerce website to provide both B2C and B2B functionality.
Doheny’s first selected Magento as their eCommerce platform with Magento 1 in 2011. In October 2019, Doheny’s launched their latest website on Magento Commerce v2. However, their move to Magento 2 was a rocky road and they faced many challenges to achieve a stable implementation and get the services from their provider that they needed to operate their growing online business.
We sought out Kadro’s expertise when our eCommerce site needed to be upgraded and was becoming unstable. We were experiencing site outages at a great cost to us during peak business times. It was clear that we’d outgrown the knowledge level of our previous partner, a well-respected, large agency. We confidently handed the problem over to Kadro to solve, and the result has been a faster, more stable site that converts better.
From initial on-site training through the development of new site features and enhancements, our Kadro team members have remained in place to serve our needs. Kadro’s relationship with top third-party vendors has been an asset. We’ve benefited from the Kadro team’s accessibility and responsiveness, proactive site monitoring, meaningful suggestions on how to handle our largely customized site, and flexibility to offer services ranging from guidance through fully managed projects. Our experience with Kadro continues to be very positive.
Solution
Sites: www.doheny.com and www.poolsuppliessuperstore.com
When Doheny’s first approached Kadro, they were seeking a Magento systems integrator that would operate as their partner. They needed a Magento development partner that could provide both the technical and business expertise to move their eCommerce business forward as well as provide clear and detailed level of communication around the problems they were having, provide the business and technical guidance their eCommerce operations needed, and a technical team that could stabilize many core features of their site.
Kadro began working with Doheny’s in October 2019 to meet these goals and objectives. Since then, Kadro has accomplished the following:
- Next Day Delivery – A major competitive offering for Doheny’s is to leverage their supply chain network to deliver supplies and equipment fast to their customers. Having accurate product availability at each distribution center is key. The initial implementation of next day delivery in their Magento Commerce site never worked properly due to a poorly engineered solution that resulted in inaccurate inventory data and ultimately bad end-user experience. Kadro created the architecture and designed the right Next Day Delivery solution for Doheny’s including the integration into their back-end ERP system to provide real-time access to inventory and zip code (inventory location and estimated shipping) mapping by SKU. As a result, Kadro engineered a custom solution to store in Redis caching over 2 billion rows of data for accurate next day delivery in Magento Commerce. In addition, the solution included modifications to Magento checkout with real-time shipping estimates for specific shipping addresses used on specific products. This feature has proven to be essential for accurate delivery expectations and meeting their next day delivery promise to customers.
- Stability of Site Search – By working directly with their hosting provider to re-engineer the Elastic Search setup and configuration, Kadro helped to stabilize the Doheny’s website site search. A deep dive analysis into the performance and search indexing issues resulted in re-building the elastic search install from ground up with an outcome of continuous stability of site search.
- New solution for product data loading and updates – The previous solution for data importing was poorly engineered and did not scale. Because of the size of the data, the old solution required significant manual manipulation of data by Doheny’s staff resulting in many hours each week to perform tedious and manual data splitting and loading. Kadro designed the architecture and engineered an improved and fully automated data feed handler for processing and loading product data from the back-end ERP system to Magento via automated schedules without any manual steps.
- Accurate Order Statuses and Updates – Kadro developed a new integration with Doheny’s back-end ERP system to provide accurate and up-to-date order status information that is changed with-in the business’ order management processes. The goal of this feature is to provide accurate information on shipping status, returns, cancels, and item swaps.
- Code management and Security – Prior to Kadro, Doheny’s Magento site was significantly behind on upgrades and security patches. Kadro stabilized the code base for easier upgrades and established a routine release management process to keep their site on current security patches.
- Stabilize Site Deployments – Prior to Kadro, Doheny’s had a horrible experience with the prior SI when new site updates were released. Post-deployment issue fire fighting was rampant. In stabilizing their code base, configuration management discipline for their code repository, and coordinated systems configuration with their hosting provider, Kadro has now stabilized the site release and deployment process, and eliminated post-deployment fire fighting.
- New payment gateway – Kadro transitioned the primary payment gateway from a custom Heartland Payment Systems gateway integration to Magento’s built-in Braintree extension including custom changes needed in the order integration with the back-office ERP system.
System Architecture
A key element of Doheny’s technical architecture is the integration between Magento Commerce and Doheny’s back-office system operating on an IBM AS/400. Kadro works directly with Doheny’s eCommerce team and Doheny’s AS/400 integrator to develop both re-engineered and new integration features via a web services API infrastructure to make sure customer, product, and order data are correctly and efficiently linked between the two systems.
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