Ongoing Magento support for Strapworks

Partnership background & goals

Strapworks is a well-known American strap manufacturer and supplier based in the US. Over the years, a small family-owned rafting supply business has expanded to become one of the market leaders with over 70 employees on board.

Having served over 400,000 customers across the country, including such giants as NASA, FBI, and Apple, Strapworks services now cover the entire supply chain, spanning strap production, customization, and shipment to corporate clients and individuals across various industries.

Initially, the customer maintained an online store based on CMS Volusion, but then decided to migrate to Magento Commerce 2.1. As the business grew, the default installation was no longer capable of serving the company’s needs as efficiently as before.

Introducing the necessary customizations was not an easy task for Strapworks: while the company invested time and money into the revamp of the store, their technology contractors kept on failing to deliver the expected results.

Desperate and discouraged, Strapworks made one last attempt to get things done and contacted Staylime. The major goal of the project was to render ongoing Magento support and optimize current business processes of the customer leveraging the best of new technology. Within the project scope, we also had to implement mission-critical functional capabilities the Magento 2 store lacked.

In particular we had to:

1. Simplify and bring in more flexibility into product configuration
2. Allow for one-click import/export of heavy-loaded .xls files outside the Magento 2 admin panel
3. Customize order management to include chained orders
4. Implement the Personal Products functionality based on out-of-the-box Magento 2 Commerce

With a detailed roadmap in place, Staylime got down to this pivotal project.

Technology challenges

Custom development might be tricky, especially when it comes to enterprise-grade projects.

Since Advanced Product Options was chosen as a base for delivery, we faced the necessity to deal with the shortcomings of the version of the extension that was available in the market back then. Due to a complex architecture of the module, implementation of the dependent options was a task so difficult, the previous vendor our customer collaborated with failed to do that.

Besides, we were also challenged by unexpected glitches in Magento 2 Commerce itself.

For instance, in the default installation, when a product was resaved, previous option IDs were replaced by new ones, which made it almost impossible to use the store as supposed to. To tackle the issue, we had to reach out directly to the Magento Commerce Dedicated Support team. Having acknowledged the bug, they then fixed it in the version 2.2 of the platform.

All in all, we always kept the customer aware of the challenges and problems arising during the development process and did our best to work out the most efficient ways of resolving them promptly, which Strapworks highly appreciated.

Design upgrade

No need to say that Magento design may have a negative impact on user experience if not delivered in-line with industry guidelines, practices, and trends. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to Strapworks.

Developed by an independent design agency, their theme not only had a dated interface design, but also didn’t meet the common UI/UX and performance requirements, which heavily affected the overall experience and, consequently, conversion rates.

However, given budget constraints the customer did not want to engage into a complete redesign.

In view of this we proposed a few modifications to the customer that would let them keep the style but enhance user experience.

After a couple of iterations, our team introduced changes that inherited the style of the legacy solution, yet featured a better-thought-out layout and usability. Strapworks genuinely loved the concept, and so we proceeded with the frontend development.

Ongoing Magento support

Appreciating our transparency, quality of service and out-of-the-box thinking, the customer approached us with a request to become their strategic technology partner and continue ongoing Magento support.

Performance optimization

Upon completing the custom Magento development activities, we shifted onto the performance aspects of the store. The product catalog set up by Strapworks was so heavily loaded that the Advanced Product Options extension could not handle the store data properly.

To meet the challenge, our team revised the extension and got rid of any excessive features the business did not use.

Within a month, we steadily made all the required alterations following best practices and standards and have finally worked out an optimal configuration of the customized module. The effort was worth it: the website performance increased by 30 points in Google PageSpeed Insights.

Migration to AWS

Even though hosting considerations were initially out of scope, we could not help but notice the irresponsible and unprofessional attitude of the existing Strapworks’ hosting service vendor. Delays in responses and inability to resolve arising issues of the support team affected both the development timeline and the overall business performance, which was completely unacceptable for a company that big.

Given the initial requirements and expectations of Strapworks, we proposed their team to opt for Amazon Web Services as a more suitable hosting platform.

We had no doubt that such a reliable, scalable, and secure IaaS like AWS would serve the company’s needs better. The customer agreed, and so we engaged a DevOps engineer into the project to carry out necessary assessments.

Having reviewed the current infrastructure, our DevOps engineer prepared a staged migration plan, estimated delivery times, and performed the migration to AWS. Currently, the ball is on Strapworks’ side: their team is making the final checks before letting us deploy the website to production.