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Maintaining Excellent Customer Service at Scale for R&R Products, Inc.

Christian Bodine on March 29, 2022

Sometimes, no matter your best intentions, a project can be laden with difficulties. That was certainly true for the R&R Products, Inc., company in the early stages of their eCommerce journey. 

When the R&R team decided their new goals were to expand from the golf products industry into the landscaping market, all while keeping up their commitment to customer service, they knew they would need a stable website with a great user experience. Unfortunately, they were working with a Solutions Integrator that wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the upgrade their website needed, from M2 Open Source to M2 Commerce Cloud. 

That’s when R&R began their search for an agency partner that had the experience and confidence needed to get into the weeds of coding complexities and also the expertise to pull the project out of those same weeds. 

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND GROWTH GOALS

R&R Products, Inc., is a name that’s synonymous with quality. As the world’s leading manufacturer of turf equipment replacement parts for the commercial turf industry, their dedication to serving the needs of golf courses, athletic fields, and more with high quality products has never wavered since their founding in 1971.

Not only that, despite their catalog featuring over 32,000 quality replacement parts, accessories, and more, their team takes superior customer service so seriously, they proudly offer a 98% rate on products being shipped the same day their order is received. When you order from R&R, you can be assured that not only will you get a quality product, you’ll also get it in a timely fashion. 

Looking to the future, R&R is also pursuing growth into the general landscape industry, hopeful they can bring their brand of quality and service to another market. 

But, with a site that worked directly against these objectives, an update with better functionality wasn’t just wished for—it was an absolute necessity.

BLOCKED BY FAULTY TECH

Standing in the way of the R&R team’s goals was an outdated website that wasn’t functioning at a level commensurate with their commitment to customer service. Their M2 Open Source website contained an abundance of archaic, specialty code, making it slow to load and hard to use. 

Having a stable website with a great user experience is absolutely crucial to R&R Products’ mission that every shopper gets the same excellent customer service every time they visit their website. 

Unfortunately, the complex fixes that would be needed weren’t achievable with the SI they were currently working with. Facing frustrated customers and internal team woes as well, Brian Larson from R&R felt the pressure to fix their eCommerce presentation so acutely it followed him home. He felt unable to disconnect from the stress even in his down time. If the company couldn’t get a better website launched, their eCommerce presentation would continue to stall the growth and expansion R&R saw for their brand. Not only that, their team members would suffer the continued weight of that stress. 

FINDING AN ECOMMERCE PARTNER WITH FOLLOW-THROUGH

When the R&R team came to Classy Llama, we knew it would be a difficult project, but that didn’t dissuade us from digging in. Delivering what clients need even through storms of difficulty is what lights llamas up, so we rolled up our sleeves and got to work discovering what R&R needed to achieve their goals, and how we could make it happen for them. 

Fitment, UX, and more: Solutions for R&R

Because of the intense level of customization R&R’s M2 Open Source website started with, Classy Llama knew it wouldn’t be a simple process to move them to Adobe Commerce (Magento). Each area of their site that was built with custom code needed to be reviewed and a new—hopefully native to Magento—solution would need to be developed. From shipping to UX to their ERP, Classy Llama began the complicated process of auditing, roadmapping, and implementing each Adobe Commerce integration that would bring R&R’s website from buggy and archaic to functional and technically up-to-date. 

One feature that was intensely important to R&R’s user experience functionality and, therefore, their goals of stellar customer service, was the interactive schematics. This functionality, often referred to as, “Fitment,” is designed to make searching for parts super simple for shoppers and is extremely popular among all kinds of parts sellers. Fortunately, Classy Llama’s extensive experience in the automotive industry and dealing with large catalogs of aftermarket parts made us the team with the technical chops needed to create an excellent fitment search solution for R&R. 

Lawn mower schematics display with all parts showing.
Hover over the part(s) you want to buy, that part lights up in the schematic and vice-versa.

After identifying that the previous SI’s work on the fitment solution would need to be scrapped, Classy Llama’s UX team got to work rebuilding the code from scratch. The team also implemented a functionality that made it possible for customers to save the models of their machinery (ex. lawn mowers) to a personal login so that when they searched, only parts for the models they own would display. 

When customers create an account, they can save their equipment and only shop what they need.
An Ongoing Partnership

After almost two years of working through various problems during the new Adobe Commerce build, the Classy Llama and R&R teams were able to build the kind of trust and connection every brand needs in their eCommerce partner. Shortly before the official launch date, R&R signed on to an ongoing partnership with Classy Llama, to provide post launch support as well as continued maintenance on whatever they need most. 

Not only that, during our ongoing maintenance, the solutions team determined R&R would benefit from an upgrade to their Adobe Commerce site. Classy Llama is now working toward kicking off the upgrade project as soon as possible. 

R&R’S SERVICE PROMISES KEPT

Now that R&R Products, Inc., has an eCommerce partner like Classy Llama on their side, their brand is primed to achieve their growth goals. Plus, their dedication to customer service excellence has the technical back-up necessary to make sure they always keep their promise to their customers. 

Selling Aftermarket on Adobe Commerce: 5 auto parts eCommerce solutions

Christian Bodine on March 22, 2022

Selling aftermarket parts online is a unique challenge. Most parts merchants have incredibly large catalogs with many complex categories. Not only that, most customers now expect an intuitive search experience where they can enter their specific year, make, and model or even a VIN lookup to ensure they’re getting a part that fits.

When thinking about this kind of advanced functionality, one of the most significant decisions that parts sellers and automotive merchants face is selecting their eCommerce platform.

Let’s take a look at some specific benefits of the Adobe Commerce platform (backed by Magento) and how they relate to selling automotive parts online.

1) Caching and Progressive Web Apps

Adobe Commerce (Magento) is a very powerful application that provides a ton of features out of the box. It can also support massive product catalogs and be extended with customizations. 

Can all of this flexibility and power really be delivered at speeds the modern shopper expects? Yes!

Adobe Commerce provides two different methods for building the user interface of your site, both of which have unique solutions for speeding up page load times. You can use the responsive theme framework with full page cache, or build your pages with Progressive Web App technology.

Method One: Full Page Cache

When you have a sizeable parts catalog, there can be a large number of product pages being accessed by multiple users concurrently. While many factors contribute to page load times – from hosting and application performance to image optimization – load times can be significantly reduced with Adobe Commerce’s built-in full page cache.

As pages are served the first time, these page files are stored in the cache, allowing them to be delivered to the end user faster the next time they are accessed. This not only speeds up the response time, but also reduces the load on the Magento application, alleviating additional slowness during peak traffic.

Method Two: Progressive Web Apps

The newest way to build the front end of your site is using Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Adobe Commerce’s PWA Studio provides a set of developer tools that makes it easier for merchants and developers to build fast and engaging mobile experiences.

Using modern web technologies, PWAs provide much faster load times and more of an app-like experience on mobile devices. PWAs cache most of the assets in your device’s browser and communicate with the site via API to get dynamic data and perform actions, providing an overall faster experience for the user.

This is important in the automotive industry, as many times shoppers are on mobile devices in the shop, at the car show, or on the go, and will return to your site multiple times as they look for that perfect part. With Adobe Commerce (Magento) PWA, mobile shoppers also benefit from app-like features such as native push notifications and limited offline access without requiring the user to install an app.

2) Powerful Attributes

Adobe Commerce and Magento’s Entity, Attribute, Value (EAV) data model provides tons of flexibility out of the box. With the ability to add different types of attributes to your products, you can refine how shoppers find what they need.

Adobe Commerce gives you the ability to set up different types of attributes depending on what data you need in order to identify or describe your products. These include:

  • Text Field
  • Text Area
  • Text Editor
  • Date
  • Yes/No
  • Dropdown
  • Multiple Select
  • Price
  • Media Image
  • Fixed Product Tax
  • Visual Swatch
  • Text Swatch

These attributes allow you to get very detailed in providing specs for your products. Attributes can then be set to be used in layered navigation, which allows shoppers to drill down to the exact product they are looking for. Attributes can also be used for displaying certain details on the product page, or even to power configurable product variations (like color, size, etc).

You can create attribute sets for the various types of products you sell. For example, you can have one attribute set for batteries and another for mufflers, each containing different sets of attributes. This makes managing your product catalog much easier. When you add a new product, you can simply select the relevant attribute set that includes all the attributes you need for that type of product.

3) Fitment

Fitment provides a method for shoppers to “shop by vehicle” and makes the shopping experience more streamlined by only displaying products that are compatible with the vehicle selected.

Rather than clicking through categories and subcategories of products for all different vehicles, fitment allows users to enter their vehicle information when they arrive on the site and review only relevant results.

While fitment is not a native concept in Adobe Commerce, it’s something that many automotive merchants rely on. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to add fitment functionality to Adobe Commerce.

One way is to build a custom solution – a benefit of having an open source platform that’s designed to be customized. A Magento-certified developer or agency can build an integration with ACES (Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard) fitment data or other data sources to power a year, make, model lookup.

If you want to avoid a custom solution, you can leverage Adobe Commerce’s extension marketplace or third party apps that plug and play to provide shop by vehicle functionality. For example, Classy Llama built an automotive accelerator that includes a fitment extension.

This extension supports various fitment fields, so in addition to the standard year, make, model, you can have fields for the drivetrain, body style, etc. It also allows customers to save vehicles to their “virtual garage” so they don’t have to select their vehicle each time they return to your site, while allowing them to easily switch between multiple vehicles they may own. Classy Llama’s fitment extension also allows you to integrate with various data sources such as ACES/ PIES, vendor data, or a product information management system.

4) Multiple Product Types

A unique advantage of Adobe Commerce is the flexibility it provides for catalogs with different types of products. Adobe Commerce (Magento) starts with the concept of a simple product and then builds upon that. Simple products are a single product with no variations or configurations. Adobe Commerce then allows you to create configurable, bundle, and group products. You can assign simple products to these other product types and allow customers to select from different variations or kits.

Configurable products allow you to create product variations based on product attributes. For example, you may sell a specific product in either a black or chrome finish. This allows the shopper to select from these options on the product page and see an updated image for the option chosen.

Bundles or groups are useful if you want to sell a set of parts for an assembly. You may have a part that requires several nuts and bolts, gaskets, wires, etc. and you can configure a bundle to include all the parts needed for the job. Adobe Commerce also provides the ability to make your bundle products configurable — letting a shopper pick from a list of products to build the kit they need.

5) Flexible Integrations

Many times automotive merchants are working with older back-end systems that have very specific integration requirements, such as an ERP that houses customer data, inventory, or a point-of-sale system. Here are some valuable ways that Magento 2 provides flexibility when integrating with other systems:

  1. Pre-built integrations are available through various software vendors.
  2. The API for Magento 2 provides access to nearly all data you would need in order to build a custom integration if needed.
  3. Custom API endpoints can be developed into the platform allowing full control over how data is sent and received.

With these tools, there really is endless flexibility in how you can integrate with Adobe Commerce and Magento.

Conclusion

While the automotive industry has many specific needs and challenges, a flexible and powerful eCommerce platform like Adobe Commerce will allow you to create a great shopping experience, while also equipping you to integrate with your existing business systems and processes. For these reasons, Adobe Commerce is a great fit for any automotive parts site, especially those with big catalogs and special product categories.

PurposeBuilt Brands: 9 Websites. One Shopping Cart. No problem.

Christian Bodine on March 17, 2022

A huge product catalog can make a website difficult to navigate, which leads to customers bouncing and, ultimately, a loss of revenue or even a bad reputation. But for a company like PurposeBuilt Brands, with nine huge product catalogs, customer confusion can become an even bigger problem.

THE CLEANING REVOLUTION

Since 1941, the Weiman family has been pioneering a new revolution they like to call, “So much more than clean,” when they started developing their expansive line of cleaning products starting with Weiman Wood Polish. This product was a first-to-the-market of its kind, formulated specially to preserve and protect fine wood furniture.

Since then, Weiman has continued to develop more first-of-a-kind cleaning products, including pioneering glass cooktop cleaner in the 1980s. The Weiman Family’s dedication to creating products that go beyond simply cleaning and instead beautify and fortify people’s belongings led them to develop a diverse portfolio of cleaning product brands. 

What started as Weiman in 1941 is now known as PurposeBuilt Brands, a company passionate about building premium brands that offer safer, gentler, and more sustainable cleaning products: “Our desire is to be better for you, your family, your business, and the environment.”

PurposeBuilt believes in operating with a purpose and passion for creating products that are prized by their users and ultimately better their lives. 

eCOMMERCE STRESS AND STRUGGLES

Because PurposeBuilt Brands is dedicated to continually improving their customer’s lives by adding to their portfolio of exceptional brands, they came to a point as a company where they realized they needed cohesion and improvement in their eCommerce presentation. 

Their previous Magento 2 websites were extremely buggy and overloaded with third-party plugins that made daily site maintenance so difficult and time consuming the upkeep was virtually impossible for the PurposeBuilt team. Because none of their sites were connected, their team had to play a game of debugging whack-a-mole each time Magento went through an update, fixing issues on one site and then checking through code on the other 8 until they could fix each site’s issues. 

Not only that, PurposeBuilt offers a robust library of helpful content available on most of their websites that drives traffic to their eCommerce stores, but their WordPress blog was constantly in danger of going down. Pat Lee, the eCommerce Director for Weiman, and the rest of his team were frequently stressed and worried about the possibility that their number one source of inbound website traffic would be suddenly and unexpectedly non-functional. 

Finally, each PurposeBuilt Brand had its own website and they weren’t connected to each other, causing their customer base to be unaware of the full catalog of quality products available to them. Their eCommerce team wanted to find a technical team with the chops to create a single shopping cart for their current brand portfolio that can scale as they add more brands. 

With their brand’s websites in such a precarious state and the anxiety of potentially losing traffic (and potentially revenue) looming over them each day, the PurposeBuilt team decided it was time to find a solution. 

CONNECTING A VAST BRAND PORTFOLIO

First thing’s first, PurposeBuilt’s team knew they needed a website with a much lower total cost of ownership. 

They began to seek a Solutions Integration partner that could debug their Adobe Commerce Magento 2 sites, reduce custom code, and centralize their website features. Pat at Weiman had worked at a company previously that partnered with Classy Llama and felt that our team was a perfect fit to solve their pain points. 

After an initial discovery period, the Classy Llama team determined making all the necessary improvements to Weiman’s current site would be time- and cost-prohibitive. We determined that, it would actually take less time, money, and effort to rebuild their Adobe Commerce M2 site from scratch. Not only that, a new build would create a website that was much more maintainable for the PurposeBuilt team providing them with the lower total cost of ownership they wanted — and with a lot less stress. 

During the new build, Classy Llama was able to help PurposeBuilt think more holistically about being a multi-brand company. 

A frustration the PurposeBuilt team and their customers alike had was the inability to shop all of the company’s brands at once. Because each brand had its own website, they also had their own shopping cart. But since one company owns all of the brands, wouldn’t it be easer if they somehow had a shared shopping cart between all of the PurposeBuilt brands?

The Classy Llama team said yes, it would, and created a brand switcher that would allow customers to add any product from any PurposeBuilt site and add it to one shopping cart. Not only that, we created a header functionality to make it easy for customers to switch from brand to brand seamlessly while shopping.

Now PurposeBuilt has the benefit of each of their brands having their own website, while also offering their customers the convenience to shop all in one place.

In addition to creating a stable, connected websites site with a single cart, our UX team created themes designed to help centralize branding fonts and colors without creating a cookie-cutter brand expression, given that each of PurposeBuilt’s brands are all distinct. Now their team has the ability to make one change to their pattern library and have it apply across all nine of their websites, or just as easily make a singular change to one of their brands. 

To solve PurposeBuilt’s problems with their WordPress instability, Classy Llama determined that the third-party extension Weiman was using to connect to their blog would not be stable on the Adobe Commerce platform. Instead, our team recommended implementing an Adobe Commerce (Magento) specific extension from MageFan, a hybrid WordPress and Adobe Commerce (Magento) blog solution. As part of this effort, the team was able to migrate a considerable amount of blog data from WordPress to Magento where it could be more easily stabilized and maintained, as well as customizing the blog styling on the blog landing pages to match the rest of their branding themes. 

Now the team at Weiman has stability for their current blog content and what they need to continue to develop an even more robust content library for their customers. 

Classy Llama also bolstered PurposeBuilt’s shipping solutions by making sure their preferred shipping partner ShipStation was still the best tool for their new sites. PurposeBuilt uses ShipStation to let customers track their order shipments through their Magento website.

After a quick audit to validate their choice, the solutions team began to integrate the shipping tool on Magento. During this integration, some unexpected bugs and challenges were discovered, but our technical experts were able to rally together, solve the issues, and get the ShipStation integration up and running. 

FROM CONFUSION TO COHESION

Thanks to the solutions built by Classy Llama, PurposeBuilt Brands now has a stable Adobe Commerce M2 site that’s able to maintain brand differentiation for each product in their portfolio. Not only that, the shopping cart integration allows their shoppers to browse each distinct brand while all of their sites are powered by one shopping cart. 

The ease of use for customers to shop all of PurposeBuilt Brands brought cohesion to their portfolio, allowing the company to better connect with their audience and bring them the high-quality products that they’re passionate about developing. 

PurposeBuilt’s team has been so happy with Classy Llama’s solution, they decided to sign on to an ongoing engagement with us before the build was even complete. Now that the website has launched, our ongoing services team is in place to provide site maintenance, further relieving the team’s stress.

As PurposeBuilt continues to build their brands, they now have a reassurance that they not only have a website that can expand along with their portfolio but also a partner who can help them with that expansion. Recently, Classy Llama developed a new project that kicks off shortly to add three additional product lines to PurposeBuilt’s website suite. 

Since working with Classy Llama, PurposeBuilt now has a stable Adobe Commerce M2 build that features multiple sites in one, cohesive yet distinct branding, and an ongoing maintenance partner in Classy Llama. Now that their team enjoys a better experience for their customers and less daily stress, they’re free to focus on what they love:  Developing more sustainable cleaning brands that can bring value to their customers’ everyday lives.

Quick in a Crisis: The Magento CVE-2022-24086 Story

Christian Bodine on March 16, 2022

Find out how Classy Llama’s rapid response to security threats keeps client data safe …

Mondays are bad enough on their own but imagine this: you barely have a sip of your Monday morning coffee before suddenly being confronted with an intense security threat on the majority of your clients’ websites.

Unfortunately, that kind of Monday is all too likely for Classy Llama’s team. When it happened recently, they knew it was up to them to put the coffee down and get to work doing whatever they needed to in order to protect our clients from the security risk. 

eCommerce Security: More precarious every day

In a world where cyber-attacks are more and more common, it’s crucial for eCommerce businesses to have reliable security systems in place.

If you don’t have someone in-house to monitor cyber-security threats, and you don’t have an outside partner to help you, your eCommerce website data, including you and your customer’s personal identifying information and credit card credentials, are at risk.

It’s not a maybe or a possibility — without proactive measures against security threats, your eCommerce data is in danger.

In fact, in 2021 alone, Juniper Research group found that eCommerce fraud rates increased by 18%. Our eCommerce fraud protection partner, Signifyd, discovered similar findings and it looks like eCommerce fraudsters and hackers aren’t going to give us a rest in 2022.

The Threat: Adobe Commerce Sites at Risk of Hacking

On Monday, Feb. 14, Adobe announced a severe security vulnerability known as CVE-2022-24086. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable Adobe Commerce sites, and was rated a 9.8 out of 10 on the severity scale by Adobe.

Not only that, by the time Adobe announced the problem and published patches to correct the vulnerability, some 500 hundred Adobe Commerce sites had already been attacked by hackers using the CVE-2022-24086 flaw.

Given that a majority of Classy Llama’s client sites are hosted on the Adobe Commerce platform, we knew immediately that we had to act.

The Response: Classy Llama’s Client Teams in Action

As soon as Classy Llama’s internal teams were aware of this threat, they snapped into action. Step one was to get everyone together and explain the problem while simultaneously creating a deployment plan to patch the vulnerability.

There was only one issue: Classy Llama’s pledge to our clients is to always communicate when we’re deploying work on client sites and getting the sign-off before actually making changes to their code. That way, clients can prepare for any possible outages or slowed response times on their site or, at the very least, they can be fully aware of what’s going on with their website maintenance.

Unfortunately, as the Security Services Team, the Account Executives and Project Managers, and the Systems Engineering Team discovered early Monday morning, this security threat was catastrophic. If a bad actor exploited this flaw against any of our clients before we got the go-ahead to patch the problem, their entire company and client base could be compromised.

As always, our dedication to serving our clients the absolute best way we can won out. It may have been slightly outside our normal policy, but together, the Classy Llama Team decided they couldn’t wait; our clients needed protection now.

The team started implementing the security patch for CVE-2022-24086 on the morning of Feb. 14, 2022 and had finished patching every single client in less than 24 hours. Because client notices were being sent simultaneously to the patch deployment, many of our clients were fortunate enough to hear about the security threat only after their eCommerce site was no longer at risk.

The Result: Safe clients. Happy Llamas. 

By the next day, not one Classy Llama Adobe Commerce site was still vulnerable to CVE-2022-24086, thanks to the quick decision-making and execution tactics of our internal teams.

“Everything was handled great. I received alerts from a number of sources but Classy Llama was the first and had the patch installed right away,” Brian Larson, Vice President and CFO of R&R Products, Inc., said.

Our clients at Weekends Only were especially impressed and grateful about Classy Llama’s response to this threat:

“I can imagine that a vulnerability of that scale and urgency would be a difficult thing to manage across all of your clients, but you guys did a great job responding quickly with solid communication and execution. Before working with CL, it was pretty much on us to keep our eyes/ears open for vulnerabilities like this, and that usually meant we would find out about it several days late after stumbling across an article about it online. It sure is great to know you have our back when something like this happens. You guys were all over it and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.” Scott Antrobus, Product Manager of Digital Enterprises at Weekends Only, said.

Of course, as usual in our world, the unpredictable is the only thing you can count on …

Security Threat 2: The Sequel to CVE-24086

Just as the dust cleared from the CVE-2022-24086 announcement, Adobe dropped another bomb, announcing a new threat known as CVE-2022-24087 on Thursday, Feb. 17th.

The silver lining of the Feb. 14th CVE-2022-24086 threat is that Classy Llama already had a proactive game plan for patching flaws just like this new issue.

As soon as the Classy Llama team became aware of the second threat, they sprang into action.

While this threat and its patch followed a slightly more complex process to deploy, our internal teams followed the same protocol: round up the troops, get everyone in alignment on the plan, and then execute. Due to Classy Llama’s pre-planning and quick action, this secondary threat was neutralized for all our clients by the end of the next day.

“You handled things exactly as I would have hoped. In both cases, our internal security teams were already aware and asking about the risks, but you weren’t far behind with your initial communication. The process you used … led to patching the next day.” Jim Twieg, Vice President of Technology for Suttle-Straus, said.

Conclusion 

Here’s the thing: Classy Llama’s dedication to our clients’ security will always be unwavering, and our goal is to work tirelessly to address any and all security threats as quickly as possible.

When a severe security threat such as CVE-2022-24086 is announced, Classy Llama’s teams are now more primed than ever to spring into action to protect clients. The quick response time and execution tactics we can implement managed to prevent any major damage from being done to any of our client sites. Thanks to our proactive approach to security threats, our clients can rest assured that their eCommerce site is safe with us and when clients are happy, Llamas are happy!

If you’d like help with eCommerce security concerns, Classy Llama has a specialized Managed Service for cyber security, designed to create a strategic relationship between you and our expert teams so we can protect your site like we did for our clients in the face of CVE-2022-24086. Partner with Classy Llama and rest assured that someone always has your back when it comes to site security.

Contact us here to get started on a security discovery asap.

Helping Build America Through Scalable eCommerce with U.S. Lumber

Christian Bodine on March 15, 2022

As the largest lumber distributor in the United States, U.S. Lumber’s plans for the future have always included two things: pursuing continued growth while still maintaining the highest standards for their customers and suppliers. 

When their previous Solutions Integration partner wasn’t able to help them achieve their eCommerce goals, they reached out to Classy Llama to help get their site launch across the finish line. 

DISTRIBUTION RELATIONSHIPS BUILT ON TRUST

Founded in 1988 by Lawrence Newton, U.S. Lumber is the largest privately held distributor of specialty building materials serving much of North America.

In the more than 30 years since their founder began their brand’s journey, U.S. Lumber has grown by opening new markets organically, and, in recent years, by acquiring several more Lumber brands in their portfolio. 

As a brand, U.S. Lumber’s mission has always been much bigger than simply selling lumber products: they consider themselves a values-based organization, meaning they always seek to serve people first, and do what’s right even when it’s hard. 

Over time, U.S. Lumber has been dedicated to consistently enhancing their offerings while remaining committed to maintaining the highest standard of trust with customers and suppliers. Today, their company serves over 15,000 customer locations in the United States and Canada with more than 50 categories of unique specialty building products.

That’s why U.S. Lumber’s eCommerce presentation is so important to them: their website should always be another expression of their commitment to excellence and continually help build trust with their customers. They need an eCommerce presence that ensures their growth goals and excellent customer service mission are never at odds, while also meeting their most important objective: creating a brand that can make a difference in our world one person at a time. 

As with anything worth doing, though, achieving these goals through eCommerce didn’t come without its share of obstacles. 

STALLED CONSTRUCTION WOES

When U.S. Lumber was ready to push forward with their growth goals through eCommerce, they reached out to a Solutions Integrator to help them build and launch a site that met their brand needs now and had the kind of foundation that could grow alongside their business. 

Unfortunately, after almost 2 years, that agency partner wasn’t able to come through for them and their site was still unlaunched. With U.S. Lumber’s eCommerce goals out of reach with their current SI and their team feeling frustrated and unsupported, they knew it was time for a change and reached out to Classy Llama. 

MILLIONS OF PRICING INSTANCES? NO PROBLEM

After connecting with the U.S. Lumber team about their frustrations, our team immediately engaged in a paid discovery process. Instead of providing cookie-cutter solutions, our team believes in the importance of discovering what a brand’s objectives are and creating custom road map to help our clients achieve those goals. 

With U.S. Lumber, this process was particularly helpful as we were able to reassure their team that all our recommendations and work would align with what their brand wanted to achieve in the future. 

Following the discovery process, Classy Llama determined that U.S. Lumber would be best served by a phased approach. First, our team rescued their current build by upgrading from an outdated Magento 2 version to the current version, as well as ensuring the code had the foundation needed to scale the site in the future. Once their current site was launched and functional so their brand could maintain contact and relationship with their customer base, our team moved into phase 2, where more customizations to the Magento code were developed. 

CUSTOM PRICING DISPLAYS FOR EACH UNIQUE AUDIENCE

Because U.S. Lumber distributes their products all over the U.S. and Canada, that means their pricing and shipping rates are going to be different depending on where their customers live. In order to make this simple and easy for shoppers to deal with, their Magento site needed a functionality called a that enabled the correct pricing to display to the correct customers based on what U.S. Lumber branch their company is located in.

This may sound pretty simple on the surface, but given the large number of branches and products offered by the entirety of the U.S. Lumber catalog, our team determined that amounts to over 11 million different pricing combinations. The solution built by their previous SI wasn’t able to scale with this pricing increase, which also meant it wouldn’t be able to scale in the future as U.S. Lumber continues to grow. 

Classy Llama architected a branch-switcher solution that allowed the site to display customer-specific pricing without causing any loading time issues for the customer, as well as provide a mechanism to update pricing data through the ERP daily. Not only that, the solution built is so efficient, the entire process of updating the 11 million+ pricing differences only takes 45 minutes. 

Additionally, the tech team was able to meet all of U.S. Lumber’s B2B requirements through native Magento code, making the website cost less to build and maintain throughout their future scalability needs. Essentially, Classy Llama was able to eliminate entire classes of future cost or risk by ensuring that their B2B solutions were architected within the Magento framework, including the branch switcher solution.   

MAKING PROGRESS THROUGH A WELL-CONCEIVED PATH

As Phase 2 of U.S. Lumber’s engagement with Classy Llama was nearing completion, their team decided that an ongoing relationship with us would suit their eCommerce needs best and signed-on to a full service retainer. That means that we get the opportunity to become U.S. Lumber’s daily partner in eCommerce growth as they move forward with their brand and scalability goals. 

Currently, our team is working closely with theirs to create a strategic road map for the U.S. Lumber brand in 2022 and beyond, including how to add more branches to their current site, as well as create a new website for another brand they recently acquired. 

U.S. Lumber’s team went from feeling let down by their previous SI to feeling supported in both the short and long term with Classy Llama as their agency partner. As their brand continues to scale and provide the lumber needed to build America’s schools, houses, and backyard projects, they can rest assured they’ve got someone in their corner who not only supports their goals, but also their mission: serve people well and do what’s right, no matter what. 

Fitment on Adobe Commerce: Improving the parts shopping experience

Christian Bodine on March 11, 2022

When it comes to shopping for auto and manufacturing parts, fitment is the perfect fit.

Fitment provides a method for shoppers to “shop by vehicle” and makes the shopping experience more streamlined by only displaying products that are compatible with the vehicle selected.

Rather than clicking through categories and subcategories of products for all different vehicles, fitment allows users to enter their vehicle information when they arrive on the site and review only relevant results. Being able to find the right part that will fit your car perfectly is essential, and that’s why the Adobe Commerce platform is a great choice for part sellers with large catalogs that also want a fitment extension. 

Adobe Commerce, backed by Magento 2, has all the technical capabilities and features sellers need to create a fitment shopping experience that makes it easier for customers to find the parts they want.

While fitment is not a native concept in Magento, it is something that many automotive and manufacturing merchants want to incorporate on their Magento websites. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to add fitment functionality to Magento.

With fitment on Adobe Commerce, sellers can create a completely customized fitment experience for their customers, and that’s sure to improve their shopping experience.

Custom Fitment

One way is to build a custom solution — a benefit of having an open source platform that’s designed to be customized. A Magento-certified developer or agency can build an integration with ACES (Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard) fitment data or other data sources to power a year, make, model lookup.

Fitment on the Magento Marketplace

If you want to avoid a custom solution, you can leverage Magento’s extension marketplace or third party apps that plug and play to provide shop by vehicle functionality.

Features and Benefits of Fitment on Adobe Commerce

1) Fitment Fields

Fitment fields are various display filters for parts that offer a powerful search result organization benefit. Users are able to filter or sort products by attributes such as price, make, model, VIN, and more, making it easy to narrow down their search and locate the correct part with minimal frustration.

2) Virtual Garage

This fitment feature allows customers to store the type of car or other machinery they own on the website. That way, each time they log in and search for parts, only those that fit their garage will appear, creating the kind of custom experience shoppers love.

3) Data Integration

When you partner with an agency like Classy Llama to get a Fitment extension on your Adobe Commerce site, you can also integrate with various data sources such as ACES/ PIES, vendor data, or a product information management system. This  ensures fitment data is accurate and relevant seamlessly.  

4) Product Information Management

If you already have fitment data integrated with your product information management system, Magento’s extension manager now makes it easier to create fitment indexes to help boost fitment performance.

5) Improved User Experience

With fitment on Adobe Commerce, customers are able to easily find the correct part for their vehicle or other machinery. That not only decreases shopping efforts and time, but also lets customers get in and out of your site quickly so they can focus on other areas of life.

Why Fitment Fits

Fitment is a great fit when it comes to making the parts shopping experience better, especially for the kind of larger catalogs often found on the Adobe Commerce platform.

Read more about fitment and Classy Llama’s work with fitment solutions here.

Making the Digital Economy Personal: Classy Llama at Adobe Summit 2022

Christian Bodine on March 7, 2022

Global Digital Commerce Insights 

From March 15-17, Classy Llama will join with digital experience makers from around the world to educate, learn, be inspired, and make connections with merchants like you at Adobe Summit 2022. This global event is an all-digital experience featuring innovative keynotes, more than 200 virtual sessions and training workshops across 10 content tracks, plus countless networking activities. 

The best part? The event is completely free of charge for anyone who registers to attend. That means, for absolutely nothing, you can attend sessions with experts like these:

All you have to do is visit Summit.Adobe.Com and register. From there, you’ll be able to save sessions you want to attend to your event schedule portal and know at a glance what your conference experience looks like. 

You can even take a quiz once you register to help pair you with sessions you’ll be the most interested in.

GIVEAWAY: Everyone wins!

Who doesn’t love free stuff? Not us! 

Since we can’t hand out our signature plush lama in person, we’re giving away a free website health check through a Google Core Web Vitals Audit to anyone who wants one! That’s over a $2000 value absolutely free of charge. 

To get your free website health check, register for Adobe Summit here, then visit the Classy Llama event page starting March 15, 2022, to sign-up for your free audit. 

BONUS: From our “everyone wins” entrants, THREE winners will be chosen to receive a free Customer Experience Audit for their eCommerce site — an over $5000 value that can provide valuable insights into optimizing your website for revenue growth.

All you have to do to be entered to win the CX Audit is register for the event and enter at our event landing page for your free Core Web Vitals Audit.

Don’t miss out! Register now to be part of the event that can help you create better, more personalized digital experiences. 

Five Reasons to Use Magento for Your Auto Parts eCommerce Site

Christian Bodine on July 15, 2019

At Classy Llama, in addition to developing on Magento for over a decade, we’ve worked with many automotive industry merchants over the years. Because of this we’ve come to recognize several features that are important when building an automotive parts site.

Selling a car part online is a unique challenge. Many merchants have large catalogs with lots of categories. Customers now expect an intuitive search experience where they can enter their specific year, make, and model or maybe even a VIN lookup to ensure they are getting a part that fits.

When thinking about this kind of advanced functionality, one of the most significant decisions that parts sellers and automotive merchants face is selecting their eCommerce platform.

Let’s take a look at some specific benefits of Magento and how they relate to selling automotive parts online.

Caching and Progressive Web Apps

Magento is a very powerful application that provides a ton of features out of the box. It can also support massive product catalogs and be extended with customizations. Can all of this flexibility and power be delivered at speeds the modern shopper expects?

Magento provides two different methods for building the front end pages of your site, both of which have unique solutions for speeding up page load times. You can use the responsive theme framework with full page cache, or build your pages with Progressive Web App technology.

Full Page Cache

When you have a sizeable parts catalog, there can be a large number of product pages being accessed by multiple users concurrently. While many factors contribute to page load times – from hosting and application performance to image optimization – load times can be significantly reduced with Magento’s built-in full page cache.

As pages are served the first time, these page files are stored in the cache, allowing them to be delivered to the end user faster the next time they are accessed. This not only speeds up the response time, but also reduces the load on the Magento application, alleviating additional slowness during peak traffic.

All versions of Magento 2 from Open Source (the free community edition) to Commerce Cloud (Magento’s enterprise cloud offering) support the full page cache feature. Magento is designed to work with Varnish as the caching mechanism out of the box.

Varnish is a third party caching solution which takes the load off of your web server when delivering cached assets. Magento Commerce Cloud includes Fastly, which is an enhanced Content Delivery Network (CDN) powered by Varnish. This is a powerful caching solution that also has the benefits of a distributed network, placing the cached files closer to the end user.

Progressive Web Apps

The newest way to build the front end of your site is using Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Magento’s PWA Studio provides a set of developer tools that makes it easier for merchants and developers to build fast and engaging mobile experiences.

Using modern web technologies, PWAs provide much faster load times and more of an app-like experience on mobile devices. PWAs cache most of the assets in your device’s browser and communicate with the site via API to get dynamic data and perform actions, providing an overall faster experience for the user.

This is important in the automotive industry, as many times shoppers are on mobile devices in the shop, at the car show, or on the go, and will return to your site multiple times as they look for that perfect part. With Magento PWA, mobile shoppers also benefit from app-like features such as native push notifications and limited offline access without requiring the user to install an app.

Powerful Attributes

Magento’s Entity, Attribute, Value (EAV) data model provides tons of flexibility out of the box. With the ability to add different types of attributes to your products, you can refine how shoppers find what they need.

Magento gives you the ability to set up different types of attributes depending on what data you need in order to identify or describe your products. These include:

  • Text Field
  • Text Area
  • Text Editor
  • Date
  • Yes/No
  • Dropdown
  • Multiple Select
  • Price
  • Media Image
  • Fixed Product Tax
  • Visual Swatch
  • Text Swatch

These attributes allow you to get very detailed in providing specs for your products. Attributes can then be set to be used in layered navigation, which allows shoppers to drill down to the exact product they are looking for. Attributes can also be used for displaying certain details on the product page, or even to power configurable product variations (like color, size, etc).

You can create attribute sets for the various types of products you sell. For example, you can have one attribute set for batteries and another for mufflers, each containing different sets of attributes. This makes managing your product catalog much easier. When you add a new product, you can simply select the relevant attribute set that includes all the attributes you need for that type of product.

Fitment

Fitment provides a method for shoppers to “shop by vehicle” and makes the shopping experience more streamlined by only displaying products that are compatible with the vehicle selected.

Rather than clicking through categories and subcategories of products for all different vehicles, fitment allows users to enter their vehicle information when they arrive on the site and review only relevant results.

While fitment is not a native concept in Magento, it is something that many automotive merchants rely on. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to add fitment functionality to Magento.

One way is to build a custom solution – a benefit of having an open source platform that’s designed to be customized. A Magento-certified developer or agency can build an integration with ACES (Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard) fitment data or other data sources to power a year, make, model lookup.

If you want to avoid a custom solution, you can leverage Magento’s extension marketplace or third party apps that plug and play to provide shop by vehicle functionality. For example, Classy Llama built an automotive accelerator that includes a fitment extension.

This extension supports various fitment fields, so in addition to the standard year, make, model, you can have fields for the drivetrain, body style, etc. It also allows customers to save vehicles to their “virtual garage” so they don’t have to select their vehicle each time they return to your site, while allowing them to easily switch between multiple vehicles they may own. Classy Llama’s fitment extension also allows you to integrate with various data sources such as ACES/ PIES, vendor data, or a product information management system.

Multiple Product Types

A unique advantage of Magento is the flexibility it provides for catalogs with different types of products. Magento starts with the concept of a simple product and then builds upon that. Simple products are a single product with no variations or configurations. Magento then allows you to create configurable, bundle, and group products. You can assign simple products to these other product types and allow customers to select from different variations or kits.

Configurable products allow you to create product variations based on product attributes. For example, you may sell a specific product in either a black or chrome finish. This allows the shopper to select from these options on the product page and see an updated image for the option chosen.

Bundles or groups are useful if you want to sell a set of parts for an assembly. You may have a part that requires several nuts and bolts, gaskets, wires, etc. and you can configure a bundle to include all the parts needed for the job. Magento also provides the ability to make your bundle products configurable – letting a shopper pick from a list of products to build the kit they need.

Flexible Integrations

Many times automotive merchants are working with older back-end systems that have very specific integration requirements, such as an ERP that houses customer data, inventory, or a point-of-sale system. Here are some valuable ways that Magento 2 provides flexibility when integrating with other systems:

Pre-built integrations are available through various software vendors.
The API for Magento 2 provides access to nearly all data you would need in order to build a custom integration if needed.
Custom API endpoints can be developed into the platform allowing full control over how data is sent and received.

With these tools, there really is endless flexibility in how you can integrate with Magento.

Conclusion

While the automotive industry has many specific needs and challenges, a flexible and powerful eCommerce platform like Magento will allow you to create a great shopping experience, while also equipping you to integrate with your existing business systems and processes. For these reasons, Magento is a great fit for your automotive parts site.

Google Analytics and Magento 2

Christian Bodine on October 5, 2016

Google Analytics is an important tool for merchants in the eCommerce and Magento communities because it allows merchants to make informed decisions about their website based on their users’ interactions. With the advent of Magento 2, it’s important to understand how the new version utilizes and integrates with Google Analytics. If you’re familiar with Magento 1, you’ll remember that Google Analytics was fairly easy to setup so you could quickly view reporting data. What about Magento 2? Don’t worry, integration with Google Analytics offers additional features with the same setup ease.

What’s the Same?

  • Universal Analytics – Magento 2 still features the same quick-and-easy Google Analytics setup. It’s just a matter of enabling the Google Analytics setting and adding your account number. Thankfully, the deprecated option of ‘Google Analytics’ (as opposed to ‘Universal Analytics’) is no longer around to add confusion during setup.

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  • Adwords – this hasn’t changed in Magento 2; it’s still just as easy as adding your Conversion ID and Label.
  • E-commerce Tracking – One very powerful feature that seems to fly under the radar is eCommerce tracking. This feature is a must-have for any eCommerce site and lets you track transaction and product data on your site. If you already use Google Analytics with Magento, you get this feature with almost no setup. The only thing required to start using eCommerce tracking is to enable this feature in your Google Analytics account. Magento does the rest.

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  • Google Tag Manager – Magento 2 Enterprise Edition includes the option to use Google Analytics via the flexible option of Google Tag Manager.

What’s New?

Magento 2 supports a Google Analytics feature called Content Experiments. This feature allows you to setup A/B tests on your Magento site to track how different versions of pages perform. Although its simplicity makes it a good solution for small-scale A/B tests, I don’t think it’s a good solution for complicated A/B testing.

To set up content experiments, (and after toggling the feature on in Magento admin configuration settings), there are only two steps:

1. A new experiment needs to be setup in your Google Analytics account. This is pretty straightforward. (Make sure to select the option to manually insert code and save this for the next step). You can follow the instructions from Google here.

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2. Connect the new experiment with Magento. Create at least two new CMS pages, (this can be done with any number of different variants), your ‘original’ version and a ‘variant’. Place the javascript snippet from the experiment setup in the previous step under the new tab, ‘Page Experiments’. Just like other Google Analytics features, Magento handles rendering the snippet in the correct place on the front end.

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That’s it! The way this simple example experiment has been set up, half of the visitors will be sent to the original page and half to the variant. You can track how your experiments are trending in the reporting section of your Google Analytics account under Behavior > Experiments.

To learn more about how Classy Llama approaches A/B testing check out this post.

What else?

A lot of our clients are interested in eCommerce tracking. And while the eCommerce tracking provided by Google Analytics provides a lot of good data, it can sometimes be hard to visualize or grasp what you’re looking at. This is where goals and funnels come in.

  • Setup your goal(s). This can be done many different ways depending on what you are wanting to track and how your user interacts with the site. Google provides documentation on setting this up different ways. A basic example of a goal is a user completing an order (reaching the success page).

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  • One thing to keep in mind: By default, Google tracks views on secure urls separately from unsecured urls. So if you use a destination goal which includes both secure and unsecured pages, you will need to setup cross domain tracking.
  • The funnel visualization view (Under Conversions > Goals) can provide great insight into how users are moving through your website and reveal pages that have unusual rates of drop-off.

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Another common thing to track is cross-selling/upsells. A merchant may want to know how often an advertised cross-sell product is clicked. To accomplish this, an event (or trigger if using Google Tag Manager) needs to be setup to let Google know when a cross-sell product is clicked. You can do this in Google Tag Manager, or by adding some javascript: javascript ga('send', 'event', 'cross-sell', 'click', '{product-id}'); Then in the Google Analytics dashboard, setup an event goal:

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Both of these goal examples can easily be modified to include different steps in the flow or more complicated events. You can view reporting details about any of the goals you’ve set up under Conversions > Goals > Overview.

These are fairly simple examples, that just skim the top of what this feature can provide.

Summary

By expanding the features in the integration of Google Analytics, Magento 2 empowers merchants to make informed decisions about their site. And the setup ease of content experiments, eCommerce tracking, and the other Google Analytics features allow merchants to focus their efforts on improving the performance of their website.

Maintaining Excellent Customer Service at Scale for R&R Products, Inc.

Christian Bodine on January 1, 1970

Sometimes, no matter your best intentions, a project can be laden with difficulties. That was certainly true for the R&R Products, Inc., company in the early stages of their eCommerce journey. 

When the R&R team decided their new goals were to expand from the golf products industry into the landscaping market, all while keeping up their commitment to customer service, they knew they would need a stable website with a great user experience. Unfortunately, they were working with a Solutions Integrator that wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the upgrade their website needed, from M2 Open Source to M2 Commerce Cloud. 

That’s when R&R began their search for an agency partner that had the experience and confidence needed to get into the weeds of coding complexities and also the expertise to pull the project out of those same weeds. 

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND GROWTH GOALS

R&R Products, Inc., is a name that’s synonymous with quality. As the world’s leading manufacturer of turf equipment replacement parts for the commercial turf industry, their dedication to serving the needs of golf courses, athletic fields, and more with high quality products has never wavered since their founding in 1971.

Not only that, despite their catalog featuring over 32,000 quality replacement parts, accessories, and more, their team takes superior customer service so seriously, they proudly offer a 98% rate on products being shipped the same day their order is received. When you order from R&R, you can be assured that not only will you get a quality product, you’ll also get it in a timely fashion. 

Looking to the future, R&R is also pursuing growth into the general landscape industry, hopeful they can bring their brand of quality and service to another market. 

But, with a site that worked directly against these objectives, an update with better functionality wasn’t just wished for—it was an absolute necessity.

BLOCKED BY FAULTY TECH

Standing in the way of the R&R team’s goals was an outdated website that wasn’t functioning at a level commensurate with their commitment to customer service. Their M2 Open Source website contained an abundance of archaic, specialty code, making it slow to load and hard to use. 

Having a stable website with a great user experience is absolutely crucial to R&R Products’ mission that every shopper gets the same excellent customer service every time they visit their website. 

Unfortunately, the complex fixes that would be needed weren’t achievable with the SI they were currently working with. Facing frustrated customers and internal team woes as well, Brian Larson from R&R felt the pressure to fix their eCommerce presentation so acutely it followed him home. He felt unable to disconnect from the stress even in his down time. If the company couldn’t get a better website launched, their eCommerce presentation would continue to stall the growth and expansion R&R saw for their brand. Not only that, their team members would suffer the continued weight of that stress. 

FINDING AN ECOMMERCE PARTNER WITH FOLLOW-THROUGH

When the R&R team came to Classy Llama, we knew it would be a difficult project, but that didn’t dissuade us from digging in. Delivering what clients need even through storms of difficulty is what lights llamas up, so we rolled up our sleeves and got to work discovering what R&R needed to achieve their goals, and how we could make it happen for them. 

Fitment, UX, and more: Solutions for R&R

Because of the intense level of customization R&R’s M2 Open Source website started with, Classy Llama knew it wouldn’t be a simple process to move them to Adobe Commerce (Magento). Each area of their site that was built with custom code needed to be reviewed and a new—hopefully native to Magento—solution would need to be developed. From shipping to UX to their ERP, Classy Llama began the complicated process of auditing, roadmapping, and implementing each Adobe Commerce integration that would bring R&R’s website from buggy and archaic to functional and technically up-to-date. 

One feature that was intensely important to R&R’s user experience functionality and, therefore, their goals of stellar customer service, was the interactive schematics. This functionality, often referred to as, “Fitment,” is designed to make searching for parts super simple for shoppers and is extremely popular among all kinds of parts sellers. Fortunately, Classy Llama’s extensive experience in the automotive industry and dealing with large catalogs of aftermarket parts made us the team with the technical chops needed to create an excellent fitment search solution for R&R. 

After identifying that the previous SI’s work on the fitment solution would need to be scrapped, Classy Llama’s UX team got to work rebuilding the code from scratch. The team also implemented a functionality that made it possible for customers to save the models of their machinery (ex. lawn mowers) to a personal login so that when they searched, only parts for the models they own would display. 

An Ongoing Partnership

After almost two years of working through various problems during the new Adobe Commerce build, the Classy Llama and R&R teams were able to build the kind of trust and connection every brand needs in their eCommerce partner. Shortly before the official launch date, R&R signed on to an ongoing partnership with Classy Llama, to provide post launch support as well as continued maintenance on whatever they need most. 

Not only that, during our ongoing maintenance, the solutions team determined R&R would benefit from an upgrade to their Adobe Commerce site. Classy Llama is now working toward kicking off the upgrade project as soon as possible. 

R&R’S SERVICE PROMISES KEPT

Now that R&R Products, Inc., has an eCommerce partner like Classy Llama on their side, their brand is primed to achieve their growth goals. Plus, their dedication to customer service excellence has the technical back-up necessary to make sure they always keep their promise to their customers. 

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