Ljusmannen - Candle Selling ECommerce Business

Technology

PHP, WordPress

Industry

eCommerce

Project Type

E-Shop

Country

Sweden

About The Project

Ljusmannen is a candle sales portal where wholesalers can register accounts and invite students to make accounts. But, how do you let students sell products without handling money up front? The answer wasn’t just a website. It was to entirely reimagine the sales cycle. School classes, associations, and large groups can use this portal to see administration and sales.

The client’s initial requirement was to develop a website that handles it all. Wholesalers register accounts and invite teachers to manage the process. The portal enables students to place candle orders without payment. Their parent or teacher accounts then verify and submit the orders to the site for actual payment. This helps students to sell products first and then pay for orders afterwards.

The portal or website also needed to be strong enough to facilitate this process and help students sell. So the main vision of the client was to develop a whole candle-selling business that works for everyone.

Key Project Deliverables

The sourcing platform and website are not limited to development alone; we also presented many other solutions to the client.

Custom Order System

The user can place the order without a cart or checkout process. Students simply need to select the product and the quantity they want to order. This also helped the students to know/get a commission upfront.

Product Group Pricing

Admin should be able to set the default pricing rule for the product group to which the product is assigned. This was much needed because there should be transparency for each product price and commission.

Account hierarchy

Portal has the account hierarchy where the Parent (Teacher) account can invite the user (Students) with the link will be the Subaccount for the specific Parent account.

Bulk Order Process

There was a requirement for bulk order placement. We customized the order section for the parent user account to validate each student’s order and generate bulk orders for payment on the website.

Custom Seller Page

The teacher’s account will have its own seller page where people can see the list of products they have and can place orders directly from the seller page. This customization feature was made with utter precision.

Update Existing Orders

Added options for teachers’ accounts to be able to update orders that are placed by their children’s accounts. This helps adults handle the technical and payment parts, and students just have to sell candles.

Major Project Challenges

Ljusmannen wasn’t just dealing with old software. It was using Drupal 7, which was outdated. Also, it was not the right software to go with what the client was exactly looking for. Another major issue was with the WooCommerce plugin. The platform used an existing one, which wasn’t used to its full potential.

As security updates were also stopped for Drupal 7, the database was prone to vulnerability. The operations that the platform was supposed to do also hit a snag. Their team struggled with a backend that was clunky and intuitive, making simple product updates a chore.

On the front end, customers were experiencing slow load times, a conversion killer in eCommerce. The biggest challenge, however, was fear. Fear of losing years of data and rankings dropping overnight.

Basically, they needed someone to step up, a partner who could fix all these issues for them. We assured them that we agree that there are complex dependencies and fragments of uncertainty. Yet we consulted to develop custom code and employ good third-party APIs so they would help them in the long run.

Solutions & Impact

Every challenge has feasible solutions, and our team has the expertise to identify specific solutions. We discussed the complete business process with the client and provided a roadmap.

First, we developed a custom cart and checkout process separate from WooCommerce using minor code customizations.
Then, we created an admin module to manage user groups and associated pricing.
Next was to implement the account hierarchy, enabling teachers to invite student registration under them.
Lastly, we built an independent order management system for teachers to handle all student orders and process them into actual site orders.

After all of this, we executed a phased migration strategy. We built a parallel Drupal 9 environment, so we can test every feature safely without affecting the live site. We utilized the Drupal Migration API to map data fields precisely.

Finally, we ran the SEO audit to check if there are any 404 errors or 301 redirects. The client was happy that all of these were delivered to them in just the span of 4 months.