Empower Your Shipping Operations with Digital Transformation Sales for Shipping

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[Music] okay welcome everybody thank you for joining this edition of dc cappy sessions my name is catherine i work with the marketing team as the partner manager at bccapp and i'll be hosting this great session we have planned for you today first a big thank you to our sponsors for today's e-session with our partners uh webscale and shipperhq and we'd like to thank them for their continued support we hold these ccp sessions events monthly with strategies in e-commerce featuring our clients digital journeys and many of our partners valuable insights and you can always see our latest events at dccapp.com forward slash events and when you do have a moment there's a poll that would have popped up and we would love any feedback you would have all of which helps us with bettering these events and we would like this to be interactive so feel free to ask any questions whenever you have any you can add any questions in the q a tab or questions and comments in the chat whenever you have them and we'll make sure to keep track of them so today we'll be hearing from ryan van hooser from marysville marine and seeing his great presentation on the digital transformation journey that they experienced and the success story that dc cap was fortunate enough to work with them on we'll also be featuring a panel of our partners and guests afterwards for a continued discussion with marysville on various points with the process of migration and some further insight with our guests from shipper hq and web scale into understanding more on hosting and other important processes of e-commerce as well as sharing insight on how to digitally transform in new ways and we will also make sure to have time for q a afterwards and if any questions have not already been answered we will ensure that they are by the end and additionally we will also have a post event networking session and we will have a link to that on the slide and it will be pasted in the chat as well so with that i'd like to start by introducing ryan who is the vice president of operations of murrysville marine a wholesale and e-commerce supplier of boating parts and accessories for over 17 years ryan has led the marketing and e-commerce efforts for marysville marine overseeing the growth and vision for both marines marine and its retail counterpart marine parts source ryan also oversees the purchasing inventory and product management for the company ensuring that all parts tie together seamlessly ryan thank you so much for being here and joining us today and we'd love for you to come on board and start your presentation okay great thank you catherine i appreciate it i appreciate uh dc cap inviting me to um speak today with everybody i hope that you find this valuable i'm just going to get my screen up and hope everybody can see it now so um all right so as i was saying um we did recently complete our transformation um with dc caps help this year um migrating from our old website platform on magento one to our new platform and i just wanted to talk today and kind of go through what that journey was like for us to give you a little bit of background on marysville marine we are a wholesale distributor of boating equipment not so much the type of equipment you might find in the sporting goods store we don't sell life jackets and inflatables and that sort of thing we do sell the parts and accessories that really make the boat operate everything from you know the the boat the engine parts the steering components plumbing electrical pieces that type of thing anything that makes the boat work is what we sell we operate out of five distribution centers across the united states we've been in business since 1973 and we've been selling online since 2002 which for the marine industry was pretty advanced at the time it was pretty novel concept to even just expose our live inventory to our customers uh to have product images and descriptions at the time so um kind of early to that scene and then um we also at the same time added our e-commerce portion of the business called marine parts source and we operate in the back end behind the scenes with an erp system called profit 21. it's made by a company called epicore if you're a wholesale distributor it's probably a piece of software that you're familiar with or have at least heard about as i mentioned uh in addition to the distribution side of our business the wholesale side we do have an e-commerce direct to consumer business called marine parts source where we target do-it-yourselfers the people that are going to take repairs and and maintenance into their own hands this has become a pretty significant portion of our business over the years we also reach out to those customers through our own ebay store as well we've been doing that for a number of years as well so we're operating those two sites as well as the ebay store out of five different locations across the country and so last year during the summer we started to really contemplate the idea of maybe we need to migrate um platforms from where we were we had been on magento version one for about five years and it had been good for us um it was a little bit of a rocky transition initially but once we got onto the platform and kind of got things figured out it had been a really a good growth vehicle for us and so you know after five years we started to take a look at um you know where we were and and what were the next steps and one of the big motivators on why we thought we needed to maybe migrate platforms was because magento did announce last year end of life for uh magento version one um they announced that it would be in june 2020 of this year and so that was something that we really took into strong consideration about you know how is that going to affect us we started to look at can we operate past end of life on magento one and we determined pretty quickly that it was something we didn't want to do for security purposes just we didn't want to be out of support and on our own to fend off any kind of attacks we wanted to make sure that we were within pci compliance so um this was the big main reason why we made that change and um or we decided to make that change um and and so we started to look at what our options were after that um some of the other big reasons that we wanted to make that migration um one was this to improve the speed and performance of the sites magento one was a pretty um complex program with a lot of bells and whistles but one thing it was not known for um was its performance particularly when you added a bunch of additional extensions onto it to get it to where you wanted to perform so one of the things we really wanted to target as if we were going to make this move was to make our sites more user-friendly have a better speed and performance for our customers another big piece of this puzzle that we wanted to attack with this migration was to improve the b2b capabilities of our site as i mentioned back in 2002 when we first started to sell online just showing inventory and having a way to place orders uh for our wholesale customers was a pretty big deal for the boating industry and um you know that that was something that kind of set us apart but 18 years later i think that customers expectations have changed dramatically um you know now the b2b customer really has an expectation level that the shopping experience for them is just as seamless as if they were shopping in a b2c environment shopping on amazon or something of that nature they want all of the performance and um features that they're used to but in addition they want some features that are specific to that b2b experience such as being able to manage multiple users on their account being able to see their account balance see past invoices and and issue returns and that sort of thing so we wanted to to dive deeper into those capabilities and see what we could do to expand that experience for our b2b customers and then another thing that we really wanted to try and improve upon with this transformation was better integration with our erp system profit 21. we had some basic integration with our magenta one sites orders were importing into the erp we were able to do some basic customer updates and inventory updates but we really wanted to tighten that integration up and and um automate a lot more of the transfer of data that's going back and forth between the two systems so that was a major point for us to address as we got into this project just because we were on version one of magento didn't necessarily mean we were going to immediately jump to magento 2. we wanted to take a look at our options magento 2 is a completely new platform from from version 1. it's not just a simple upgrade they basically started from scratch and and rebuilt the whole platform so it is a true migration so with that in mind we did decide to look at different uh possibilities for what would be the best fit for us we looked at shopify plus big commerce we looked at oro commerce which is a e-commerce platform that is specifically designed and targeted more to the wholesale distributor and of course we looked at magento version 2 as well we looked at some other pieces of software too ultimately we did come down to deciding to go with magento and there were some specific reasons why it stood out and was a better fit for us one of the main reasons was it just comes with a lot of features compared to some of the other options that are out there one of the things as i mentioned before that we wanted to try and avoid is a lot of additional extensions because they really weighed down your platform they can really affect the performance negatively so finding a piece of software that had as many of the features that we were looking for out of the box was important because we felt like it was going to perform better and more seamlessly than if we had to put a bunch of extensions together to make it to where we wanted it to be so um that was important we also it was critical that the piece of software that we went with could support multiple sites running off of the one installation since we did have both marysvillemarine.com and marinepartsource.com and it was important that we had support for multi-location or multi-source basically that it could handle understanding that we had five locations of inventory we're shipping from different areas depending on where the customer is you may want to use a different location for the source of of the order you know that was something that we just wanted to make sure that that software could support another big selling point for magento and we went with the commerce cloud version of magento the reason why it's because the cloud version offers a lot of b2b features they have a whole set of b2b features and um tools that the regular version of magento and then other e-commerce platforms just did not have and there's a lot of um work being done in this space as far as big commerce shop shopify they're all salesforce they're all aiming towards trying to um add this type of functionality to their platforms at the time that we were looking at it a year ago magento just seemed like they were a step ahead i haven't looked to see what the comparison is like today but certainly a year ago magento seemed like they were further down the road with b2b features than some of the other platforms that were out there and then i'm not going to lie transition having an easy transition between the two systems was important even though it is completely rebuilt from scratch magento 2 is a lot of the language and organization of data that is used is the same as what was on magento one so we felt like there was going to be a little bit less of a learning curve with um with going with that platform versus if we jumped completely to something new and then finally what was really important for me was making sure that there was a strong developer community around the software you know e-commerce environments always changing the expectations of the customers are always changing and it seems like it's just accelerating the need for change every year it seems like there's just so much more to know and keep up with so we really wanted to make sure that we were partnering with a software package that there was a lot of investment in its growth and that there was a developer community around it that was going to continue to thrive so that we would have flexibility as we went into the future you don't want to be stuck on a platform that's going nowhere that's not adding new features as they develop that's not paying attention to the direction that the industry is going and so we felt like with magento there was a really strong support community around it that we were going to have options as we go into the future we're going to be able to find developers who could help to steer us in the right direction and add the functionality we need as we discover it so then another one of the more critical pieces of the beginnings of this project is choosing a developer partner to help guide us through the migration and there's a lot of different factors to consider when you're looking at a developer who to pick and i've tried to list all of those different factors here i i hope that i've covered them all first of all you you definitely want to find somebody who can communicate effectively and second you know it's really important that they can communicate really well and and third it's just so important that they have really good communication skills and i don't know if i mentioned this but fourth did i mention communication um i think that i'm a little bit traumatized from previous projects when we've migrated pre before we had developer partners who just weren't responsive or when they did respond it was really delayed or it was a very vague response and it took several interactions back and forth to really get clear answers from them you know it's it's just so important to find a partner that you can depend upon to respond quickly uh to be concise and clear and honest and that's not always the easiest thing to find and even when you're in the initial stages of an interviewing a developer it's it's tough to know what you're really going to get when you um start the project because everybody's on their best behavior when they're first being interviewed for the job right so everybody is responsive and doing all the right things crossing the teeth and dotting the eyes and you really don't know who you're working with until you sign on those papers and you start the project but there are some clues and and tips i think you can pick up on through that initial interview process that i think helps to give you an indication of what to expect later obviously communication is not the only thing though it is the most important thing for me uh when we were choosing to develop or there were other factors as well and most of those centered around the fact that we wanted to make sure that the partner we chose was going to be capable of pulling off the project we know that we offer a lot of complexity to what we were needing and so it was important that we had someone who's really capable and who had experience with those types of complex projects before so one of the first things that we did was we reached out to magento directly and got their recommendations and we told them what we were needing you know as far as multi-site multi-locations that we wanted to integrate with profit 21 and they gave us a short list of developers that they were familiar with and comfortable recommending for that type of project all of them were magento certified and and that was really the first checkbox that that had to be checked off was that the developer had all of the credentials and um and was familiar with the software and then second we wanted to make sure that they were capable of the integration with profit 21 were they familiar with that piece of software did they have the talent on staff to be able to um understand it and integrate it with magento and in previous projects you know we've had to hire multiple developers you know one for handling the integration part and then another to handle the front end web development and that can get messy if you've got two and three developers working on the same project when something doesn't work everybody's in first response is to say oh it must be the other person's code that's creating the issue so it's really appealing idea for us to find a partner who could do everything from beginning to end who understood the entire project both the back end and the front end parts of it and how they work together that's not an easy thing to find either another piece that we wanted to look for was um has that developer had experience with similar types of customers as us other wholesale distributors doing b2b web interfaces um have they dealt with doing multiple sites have they done dealt with doing multiple sources of inventory have they dealt with profit 21 before have they dealt with magento before um could we see similar types of projects in their history to us so that was something that we looked up for and then of course you know you can't go on amazon and just read customer reviews of your developer uh but there are sites out there like clutch where you can review um coders and developers and programmers and so we definitely checked those and of course with everybody that we were interviewing we asked for references and we interviewed those customers uh to see what their experience was like to see if it was similar to ours and if they had any major issues in working with with those developers now obviously because i'm speaking today you guys know that i did choose dc cap as our partner for this project and they really just checked all of those boxes that we were talking about they came in with multiple magento certifications they were familiar with profit 21 had done that type of integration with magento before they had done uh similar projects as to what we were asking for previously had similar types of customers to us and the reviews and the the testimonials that we were able to find about dc cap were all really positive but more than anything else their communication through that initial phase of um investigation of different developers everything was just top notch that really stood out in the fact that they provided feedback quickly they were very responsive to our questions they were clear about what they could do what limitations there might be for what we were looking for so i just can't say enough about all of that really was a good hint to how they were going to operate during the project they really had great communication and i'm happy to say that as we've gotten into the project and now um gone through to completion with launch um that has held true throughout the entire process it did really come down to dc cap and one other company um who also uh was had high grades on all of these issues i mean they they also had certifications and could do that the integration had similar customers but one thing that really um beyond all of this that made dc caps stand out for us was this piece of software called clorus which i do feel is a game-changing piece of middleware that we're using to connect magento with uh profit 21. now a lot of times when you're doing integrations between two systems it's just a a couple of apis it's a bunch of code and if you're like me maybe you're just a layman and you wouldn't understand what all that code means but what the great thing about corus is it's a graphic interface that you log in and you can very easily see how the two systems connect together you can see that this field from p21 maps over to this field in magento and you can see the schedule for how often it's updating and you can see the direction does it does it update just from profit 21 to magento or vice versa or do they update each other and and it's all customizable so i mean it's it's a really fluid piece of software with infinite number of integrations that you can create between two systems and it's not just for those two pieces of software either it can integrate with other e-commerce platforms it can integrate with other erp systems i think it can integrate with salesforce and hubspot and other marketing type of systems as well so there's a lot of functionality and ability with this software and um for us it really stood out as a powerful piece to this project and was one of the big reasons why we decided to choose dc cap as our partner another great thing about course it's got detailed logging so it's very easy to see if something didn't work right or if you see that you know an update didn't happen when you expected it you can go into those logs and pretty quickly find what was the issue did you have some messy data that's usually the cases you had bad data that didn't cause it to not update and so you can find that and and troubleshoot it pretty easily so i definitely if anybody was coming to me and was trying to go with through this same type of project this is something i'd i'd definitely recommend they take a strong look at so beyond the developer being a you know good at communication it's really important for us that we were good communicators as well particularly in the portion of the project when you're defining the project scope you've chosen your platform you've chosen the developer you're going to work with now you've got to really explain to them everything that you're looking for in the project and you know a good developer partner will guide you they'll ask the right questions as they know them to be to try and step you through the process but they're not going to know the nuances and the idiosyncrasies of your business and it's really the the responsibility of the customer to communicate those to the developer and and we try to over communicate our needs i mean just get really detailed you can't communicate too much when it comes to this portion of the project we tried to highlight the main priorities that were the most important to us like i mentioned at the beginning of the presentation things like the performance um the erp integration working correctly um you know the enhanced b2b functionality that we were looking for and you know so they knew that those were the things we were going to be really measuring them on but we also got really specific on things like design and we've got in-house designers so we were able to put together mock-ups and hand them over to dc cap and they were very we were very explicit about how we wanted the home page and the product pages and the category pages to look and they were able to match them almost exactly dc cap was so that was terrific and then for performance we got very specific about the metrics we were looking for what kind of page load times we were wanting i mean we put numbers to this to give detailed um expectations for them and then also with functionality step-by-step processes of this is how we want the user experience to go and try not to miss or assume that they that dc caps going to know any piece of this um just really get specific on it and that scope of work documents got to be very detailed and if and it's hard to think of everything i would say that you're not going to i know i didn't but you try your best to cover all your bases and again just be very detailed about it when you sign off on it because later in the project you want to avoid any surprises as much as possible and then one of the other things once you're defining the scope is you're going to be picking out what kind of integrations you're going to need to go along with the the main web platform i don't think there's a e-commerce site out there that can get by just out of the box most everybody's going to need some sort of third-party integration even if it's just for shipping and and payment but what you want to try and avoid is you know adding too many of those i know there's a lot of really attractive integrations and extensions that are out there and you're like oh that'll be neat to add to my site but you start loading the side up with a bunch of those and the next thing you know it's frankenstein's website where you've got all these different pieces cobbled together to try and and create the site that you want but it ends up turning out to be a monster and then your customers are um charging after you with the torches and pitchforks and uh we we want to avoid that so you don't want to have franken's frankenstein's website you want to be very selective about the integrations that you're going to choose here are some of the main third-party integrations we're using we use shipper hq for a lot of our shipping functionality this is new to us and it's really been eye opening the amount of functionality and and options and and how much we can enhance the user experience uh with that tool we're using paypal and pay flow po pay flow pro for our payment integration we've been using payflowpro for many many years mailchimp is our email marketing tool and and then trustpilot we use for our service and product ratings then i've included a couple of developers of extensions down here uh amnesty and mage fan these are magento extension developers that are really top-notch they've developed a lot of different extensions for magenta almost all of them are highly rated and you know that's the type of thing that you really want to look for with a an extension developer just like you would with a regular project developer do they have high ratings do they have good customer response you can look at the q a on a lot of these extensions pages to see are they responding to the customer questions are there regular updates of the extension is it live or has it been dormant for many months or years you really want to try and only use extensions that are being made by reputable certified developers like amnesty and magefan another big piece of this project for us was it's a lesson i have to learn every time we get into a big project like this and i try to be mindful of of changing the way operations happen as a result of changes with the website what i mean by that is that the website touches all aspects of the business whether it be sales customer service marketing shipping receiving purchasing accounting the things that you do and the choices you make with the website particularly when you're doing a big migration like this it has ripple effects across the entire company so you change uh some piece of data you change a process you really need to test that change through to completion it's not enough to just say okay we're changing this one field or a piece of data on how orders are generated and it comes over to the erp so yeah it works and that's not enough you really need to see does once it gets to the erp how does that order process how does your pick ticket look when you when it goes to the warehouse how does shipping have to deal with it if you have to conduct a return on that order what does that look like does the data affect any of those steps does it affect the daily or monthly accounting um yeah i would love to say that you know i went into this project and our team thought of everything but it's just not possible but as you change these different pieces from what they may have been previously you just really want to test that through to completion one example would be like um we have a field for the attribution of the sale of an order uh to a particular location so let's say that we sold a um an item to a customer that's in in michigan right and we would want to attribute that sale to our michigan location but at the time that they purchased it maybe there weren't anything in stock in michigan so it actually came out of florida or something of that nature but that value that comes over to our system would be saying the sales contributed to michigan so we had a situation with our new sites where we neglected to inform tc cap of how we wanted that data to come across how we wanted those attribution logic to work and so everything was basically getting attributed to our michigan locations they had a really good sales month in august they looked great um but obviously that's not how we wanted to go and it affected purchasing because now they're looking at the numbers and saying well we had this huge spike in uh sales in michigan do we reorder based on that it affected accounting and so these are the things that just a small change for your web can can make a big impact on on the rest of the company some other operational changes that we made include like we added paypal express payments that wasn't something we had offered before we used pay for pro for our credit card processing but never accepted paypal payments pre uh before and you know that created a situation where uh we had to adjust and add additional administrative tasks to be able to capture those funds and balance at the end of every day that we hadn't had to do previously the process is different for those payments than it was for our regular credit card processing so it required creating a new process internally we also added the new b2b customer management functionality on the site so that our wholesale customers would be able to add multiple users and they can remove them and set permissions and so forth and we realized quickly that that was something we were going to need to educate those customers about really one-on-one our customer base is not necessarily the most savvy of computer users they're definitely excellent marine mechanics but they're not always the best on a keyboard and screen so a lot of times you're trying to educate that customer on how to use this new functionality and make their account really work the best way possible over the phone so that was a challenge um we added regional delivery options we had had delivery options before but we had never really offered them through the site so that's a new aspect and we had to make sure that we were prepared for how that order looks when it comes across from the site to our warehouses thanks to shipper hq we're able to add estimated delivery dates at checkout for our customers which is a great improvement in the experience but it also sets an expectation level um for our customers and we accept back orders so that kind of throws a wrinkle into that we had to make some adjustments to make sure that we weren't setting on real expectations for our customers we were able to improve the shipping rate estimates again thanks to shipper hq that much more accurate estimates of shipping rates we were also able to add a requisition or quick order form for our b2b customers which is new because a lot of b2b customers they already know what they want they know the part numbers they don't need to do any kind of shopping experience where they're browsing around or clicking through categories they can just open up a form put in their part numbers and quantities and hit submit and be done and so we wanted to give them that kind of functionality and then you know just more integration with the erp against one of our main goals with the project so more tight integration of customer data order data product data and so when you're pushing all that data around you have to be really careful uh that it's correct and it's going in the right fields because if you do it incorrectly it could again have that ripple effect that affects uh beyond just the website i'll give another example of how an operational change can have some unintended consequences so we're using shipper hq now and able to get more accurate rates which is great and able to provide estimated delivery times which again great these are two things that improve the user experience this is what we're going for we want to continue to improve the user experience the unintended consequence of this is that fedex became a much more attractive option at checkout the rates for fedex ground were usually better than ups ground for us and also because the estimated delivery times you know fedex delivers on saturdays so particularly for orders that were later in the week our customers are seeing estimated delivery with fedex that's much quicker than ups these two things combined to make fedex just a much more attractive option suddenly after launch we see this huge spike in the number of orders we're processing using fedex as the shipping method now previously ups had been our main shipping method that that most customers choose so this was new to us um were our shipping departments prepared no not really this was a surprise um you know in each warehouse we've got areas designated for where we stage our ups packages and where we stage fedex packages all of a sudden the fedex area isn't nearly as as big of enough as it needs to be so we've got to do some uh quick thinking and rearrange how our our staging areas are are our design so that we have enough room for for fedex packages additionally the processing of fedex orders is a little bit more manual than ups it's a couple little extra steps and again so now you're slowing down the shipping department from what they were used to where it was a much quicker processing for a lot of packages now there's a number of packages more that have that longer process so again we're in the busy part of our season in the summer and uh that was a challenge and then you know even fedex drivers were not prepared and were affected by this because all of a sudden these drivers are showing up every day and picking up three times as many packages as they were previously do they have room on the truck you know those are the questions that we didn't know we were going to have to ask when we started this you know all we wanted to do was just provide a better experience for our customers at checkout who knew that these types of ripples were going to happen and again that's why i say you really try to the best your ability to test that through to completion what does it look like when and anticipate what what might happen when you make these changes some other challenges that um we've run into with this project and i think every web development project is probably run into this first one which is the changing timeline i can't name a web project ever that finished on time if you have ever been a part of one um then you should be the one giving this speech not me but um you know it's something that we we tried to stick to as best we could we started to put this project together last summer and fall and we really were targeting april as our launch date because as you can imagine the boating season is busiest during the summer june july august are just peak times we wanted to try and launch before we got to that season and it just wasn't something we were able to pull off i mean it was going to be a tight window to begin with but then the pandemic happens and again one of those things that in 2019 we couldn't have predicted so that slowed down our operations it slowed down the ability of dc cap to um work on the project though i will give them kudos they they were able to recover quickly there were lockdowns in india where a lot of their developers are that slowed things down but they were able to facilitate remote working for their developers and and get the project moving forward very quickly from that it wasn't too much of a speed bump and um and again for us as well we had to navigate that during the april may time frame and it slowed down the project some so again now we're we're having to do the launch during the busy season because again we have that deadline of of magento one end of life in june and so i would have loved to push this off to the winter when we were slower but it just wasn't a reasonable thing to do so we had to navigate launch when we were at our busiest time uh when the most eyes are on us when the most customers are coming to us so any issues just going to be amplified by 10 because of uh the amount of customers that we're dealing with during that time another issue that we're still grappling with though i think it's going to get better is the how we handle order allocation through our multiple warehouses obviously we want to ship in the most efficient way possible but that can become a pretty complex algorithm particularly with us because we throw a lot of wacky stuff at dc cap to try and make this work including we allow ordering of out of stock items we allow orders to be split into multiple shipments from from multiple locations just depending on where we have it in stock so particularly on the b2b side when a customer can build a cart that's 15 20 25 items long that can become a really cumbersome algorithm to try and figure out and it can slow down that checkout process so we're working through that issue to see how can we improve and make that a more efficient allocation of the order another challenge for us is handling b2b customer pricing not every customer gets the same price on our b2b website there are different levels there are tiers uh certain customer segments may get a special price on certain brands but then the standard price on other brands so it's it's pretty complicated it's really had us go back to the drawing board and say are we doing this right maybe we should rethink our whole pricing structure and make it simpler and i think that's probably an approach we're going to take in order to navigate this challenge and as i mentioned before just the the challenge of educating and engaging our b2b customer helping them to understand how the new site works i mean it's a pretty um intuitive and prototypical e-commerce experience for the most part but that b2b part of it is different and not all customers are gonna pick up on it right away so you know taking the time do that one-on-one education with them and educating ourselves for us so that they can go out and um and and work with the customer and and that help them to understand how it works it is important as well and then another big challenge and i think this is probably a pretty common one for a lot of companies is just dealing with messy data and we've been in business for over 40 years and we've got you know a lot of data that we've collected whether it be product or customer data over the years and maybe we haven't always put it in the right spot or been consistent with how it's been entered and that can lead to issues particularly when you're pushing around pushing it to the website you're setting up operations to depend on certain values it's really important to try and get it consistent and you know you've got a company of x amount of people we've got 60 employees and everybody is maybe doing something uh the way they see to do it um and can mean 60 different variations of how that data is entered so standardizing and making your data consistent is a really important thing to ensure that you don't run into issues later i read amazon recently called it um data hygiene and i think that that's a really good term for you you really want to try and clean it up and make it consistent as much as possible and another one of the big things to to address those challenges and i mentioned it before and i wanted to mention it again is just the communication piece communicate and then communicate some more with that developer with your partners in the project dc cap was really great they set up weekly communication calls with us every day at the same day every week the same time every week we were on a call with dc cap where they were able to go over what they had been working over for the previous week what they had planned for the upcoming week what they were going to be working on as an opportunity for them to ask questions to share their screen and demonstrate different things to us and work through any issues that were coming up and there were was a representative from magento on those calls each week as well so he was a resource for us to be able to ask technical questions and make sure that we were doing things to their standards and and exercising best practices we used a couple of communication tools as well throughout the project that were really valuable base camp initially and then once we got into the testing phase of the project we used trello which you have if you haven't used it's a really nifty tool for um basically just managing multiple tickets and and we you can move them around into different statuses it's just a nice project management type of tool um that we found very valuable we're still continuing to use after launch as we address you know things that we see come up or it things that we want to implement and then i know it's kind of an old technology but screen captures were so valuable throughout the project just to help in communicating what you're looking at what you're wanting and particularly in testing uh you know i'm the philosophy that you get a lot of people involved in testing from all over the company because you know again the website is touching all kinds of jobs within the company so get those people involved to check out the processes that affect them and teaching them all how to do screen captures and make notes on those screenshot captures was really valuable just to speed up communication to help dcap understand what we were looking at you know it seems basic but it was just it was really important for us and the final thing i'll just say with our project that was really important was to measure results um you know you spend a lot of money on a platform migration they spend a lot of time a lot of effort a lot of brain cells and it's important that you're getting something for that we didn't want it to just be a lateral move because magenta one was nearing into life and we had to make a move we wanted to get something out of this so you know for me conversion rate is like the ultimate metric that really tells you um whether your new website is performing better or worse than the old one because it's no matter how big the audience is it's telling you uh what that experience is like for the customer are they uh converting to an order which is ultimately what you want to see right so i'm happy to report with our new sites we've been launched about five or six weeks now uh conversion rate is up anywhere from 25 to 35 depending on the day a week uh which is really exciting and another thing that we were measuring was the page load times and um you know that was one of our key uh priorities that we wanted to tackle with this project and i'm happy to report that we're we've got page load times that we're up to 50 faster than our old sites again i think a lot of that has to do with getting rid of those extensions having the native features of magento to to do what we're wanting it to do in terms of the user experience and the bounce rate is lower by about 15 percent for our new sites which is great bounce rate can be kind of a um sticky um feat sticky metric to measure by uh it can be misleading but um and take taking it in context with some of these other things that we're seeing and i think you can see it's a positive one and then the average session time again taken on its own it may not tell you much i mean if session times are up that could mean that the customers are struggling to find what they want or do do the whatever action they're trying to do but in this case when you compare it with also conversion rate page load times and that sort of thing um i believe that this is a positive metric for us that the sessions are lasting about fifty percent longer uh than they were on the old sites so all really good results and um you know we're excited about just how seamless this transition has been from our oil sites to the new ones and we're excited for the platform that we have and the partner that we have we feel like there's a lot of opportunity to continue to grow as anybody who's been through web migration will know it's never done there's never a finish line you're continually going to be revising and improving to try and meet whatever new customer expectations there are so that's really all i have and i appreciate all of you signing up and listening to the presentation uh if you've got any questions feel free to reach out to me on linkedin or you can email me directly r van hooser at marysvillemarine.com um i've enjoyed talking with you guys and again feel free to reach out to me be happy to discuss any of the questions that you have about the presentation with that i am going to let cathy take it back over thank you so much ryan um we do actually have a question from hillary and um i'd love to ask that to you right now i'm just asking how how did you prioritize your third party integrations and resources um well you know that's that's a good question um it's that's a broad question i could do another hour or so on that so um it just takes discussion amongst your your core team about what's the most important thing to you for us you know um there's no compromising on the fact that we have multiple sites that we had multiple warehouses so that functionality had to come first um and then the basics of you know checkout and making sure that you know we meet the shipping is really important and we've just learned that through experience so um making sure that we were quoting accurate rates that we had the flexibility to do things like free shipping rules and and um to do um restrictions to certain areas to be able to offer like the delivery options that we offer to our b2b customers store pickup that sort of thing so that whole shipping part became really important for us um and and i just think that that's an important piece of any e-commerce um platform shipping and payment are are just gonna be at the top two on your list i would think um beyond that you know it's it's what do the customers expect so it's gonna it's just gonna depend on you know what are they already used to um and what's gonna be the thing that that gives you the most return on your investment so what could help the customer experience the most i think that's probably something that you'd want to look at when you're prioritizing which extensions to choose awesome great thank you so much for the great detailed answer thanks and it was really great you know your presentation just hearing your thought process going through all the options for the project it could certainly be a daunting task for anyone and hearing your insights on choosing a platform and choosing a developer navigating the challenges and the great results i think that can be really helpful to those looking to make a similar change so thank you very much we will be sharing all this great content post event and we'll be hosting the videos on demand on our events page as well uh so be sure to check that out and share it across with anyone you think would be great insight for and then also i'd like to once again say thank you to our sponsors uh web scale and shipper hq for their support and contribution to the event and we'd also just like to take a moment to mention that there are some great promotions available with a 30-day free trial with dc caps product chorus which ryan spoke about and with three months of m1 support from web scale and a 30-day trial of shipper hq thank you again everyone for joining us for this month's event and we have a great lineup for next month's event as well so please keep watch out for that and again you can see all of our upcoming previously held sessions as well on our website at dccap.com forward slash events have a great rest of the day everyone [Music] you