Custom Magento Upgrade Solves Data Troubles and Grows Sales

WigSalon, “America’s Hair Experts,” started as a beach community store that ballooned into an ecommerce business, leading them to require necessary upgrades across their Magento API. As their customer base expanded over decades, thousands of product records and web data grew, too.

They found their e-commerce store was causing problems, and needed to fix it, fast. Without a proper web system to track inventory and orders, product data was being uploaded into the wrong categories, making their data unreliable - resulting in lost sales. Maintaining enormous sets of product data is necessary because part of their success is their ability to offer a large variety of unique styles.

Cataloging thousands of wigs into detailed options was unsuitable under their previous platform. Therefore, WigSalon sought a custom Magento 2 upgrade to solve the data and ecommerce difficulties for their business.

To solve the growing frustrations, and reorganize the online store, the owner began the mission of finding a reliable and experienced Custom Software Development Company Through discussions, we eventually learned his original site was one of the world’s first “click and pay” online stores.

Right away, his insight shined through while explaining the history of the business, his wig catalog, and the online customer sales process which allowed us to understand his goals. Our consultation period gave him time to explain his ambitions for us to develop solutions that helped set his business on the right path.

After reviewing WigSalon’s website, we discovered an outdated site, with cluttered and chaotic data, limiting its potential and use of extensions. The disorganization affected product uploads, product listings, SEO practices, and inventory tracking. Magento web extensions were being used to make up for the technological setbacks in the system.

While some extensions provided out-of-the-box solutions, they couldn’t address the underlying problem. A properly built web API gives business owners the ability to solve and expedite other functions like accounting, inventory, and CRM. Knowing this, we recommended repairing WigSalon’s backend architecture, along with a custom Magento upgrade, to solve enormous setbacks at the source.

After analyzing the existing product data, it was clear a complete data transformation and migration was necessary for a pristine custom upgrade. To correctly transfer tens of thousands of products to the new site, a custom backend architecture was necessary. Because of the original misclassification of data that existed, this involved writing data scripts to link data together.

WigSalon was misusing the Simple Product category in Magento 1 instead of the Configurable product category. Ultimately, writing custom data scripts took improperly labeled data and reorganized it to file it accurately inside their new custom Magento theme design. Along with correctly filing data, this simplified the uploading and listing of future products.

We took the time to learn the client’s data set before starting on the custom Magento upgrade. This is important for a successful upgrade. Discovering where WigSalon’s data setbacks existed was the next step in this process. For example, in their previous website, they were listing wig colors inside Magento as a Custom Option by mistake.

To efficiently track their products in Magento, wigs needed to be classified as a Configurable product. Classifying wigs as a Configurable Product, further sub-categorizes wig colors as a variant under the new Magento site. This change allows for the drop-down list of color variations to exist while giving each wig a separate SKU, placing a unique identifier for each product. Having a unique identifier for each product produced a better data structure and allowed for a new inventory tracking system to be set in place.

This was another solution WigSalon needed and welcomed. Tracking inventory advanced their effectiveness to streamline day-to-day tasks associated with product management.

Even with a recent custom theme design, we added Amasty web extensions to provide superior performance for a store with immense product data. The largest difference now was reliable data that could be located and orchestrated uniquely across the site. If left unaddressed, a site with a product catalog of 30,000+ can see reduced speeds for loading pages, on-site searches, mobile traffic and checkouts.

To overcome these concerns, we added a bevy of extensions. The Full Page Cache Warmer extension allowed products to load into the site’s cache for quicker access to recent visitors. The Amasty extensions also included a search tool, called ElasticSearch, that helps with autocomplete, and spell correction, that’s also more responsive and mobile friendly.

Our recommendation of extensions for our client included multiple benefits like infinite scroll, automatic product recommendations, a one-step checkout page and an option for customizing the thank you page. These were all positive factors that gave the client more tools to improve conversion rate and customer experience.

The custom Magento theme design that included data refactoring and web extensions, made shopping and data tracking faster and easier. Since the upgrades, the website saw a 42.5% sales increase in its first two months when compared to the previous two. WigSalon has minimized the time required for small, but necessary tasks like product labeling, inventory and accounting. The custom Magento upgrade and backend architecture brought the ecommerce business up to date and to its maximum potential.