NEWMEDIA was able to bring a team of developers, UX experts, and designers that were used to tackling complex problems. NEWMEDIA has extensive experience with setting up payment plans and performing integrations with 3rd party services. Other vendors provided solutions that were too limited (Magento) or too custom (Ruby on Rails).
The project with SPI had many challenges. Internationalization/localization, multiple complex product checkout flows, multiple currencies tied to multiple payment processors, and Quickbooks integration to name a few. But, the number one challenge was SPI’s desire to be a nimble and adaptable partner with their students. This is an admirable trait of the corporate ethos but it did pose some problems when trying to efficiently develop usable solutions.
Continuous communication among team members and stakeholders was a key piece in making sure the complicated requirements were executed appropriately. And when things did get out of sync, both teams were able to quickly get back onto the same page, saving money, saving time, and building trust.
Internationalization / Localization
SPI had decided to move their business into markets that didn’t speak English as their first language. This meant that all of the content on the new site would have to be translated and displayed based on their customer’s language. Adding in and managing the translations also had to be something SPI could do efficiently and without additional developer assistance.
We used a handful of specialized contributed modules to allow for a seamless transition between languages.
- Entity Translation
- Translation template extractor
- Locale
- Internationalization
- Field translation
- Menu translation
- String translation
- User mail translation
- Variable translation
- Views translation
Using our process we were able to give SPI the flexibility to translate any piece of content or interface on their site as they require now or in the future.
Checkout Flows
SPI sells Sensorimotor Psychotherapy training to experienced Psychotherapists. In order to verify the customer’s psychotherapy experience they must submit an application and be approved to purchase training. This required extensive planning to ensure the appropriate workflow, architecture, and future maintainability.
We chose Drupal Commerce as the backbone for our commerce solution because of its flexibility and widespread adoption within the Drupal community. Once in place, we were able to build custom order types, product types, and custom checkout flows. This allowed us to tailor the checkout experience based on the type of product that was being purchased. Because the products being purchased drove the checkout experience, depending on the product that a customer was purchasing they could
- Be offered a payment plan
- Setup an ongoing recurring payment
- Be an application with questions the customer must answer
- Be prompted to agree to certain terms and conditions
- Or be given the ability to enter a specially validated discount code
This was a non-trivial build-out and required extensive planning (user stories, IA, flow diagrams, etc), but this time investment was well spent during the development phase and ensuring the customer understood all the subtle nuances.
Multiple currencies tied to multiple credit card payment processors
Due to the many intricacies of being a multi-national corporation, SPI was required to have multiple credit card payment processors. We at NEWMEDIA wanted to make this seamless and transparent to the end user.
Security. That is the first thing we think about when architecting a new commerce-based site. But, SPI required us to also think about flexibility. Luckily we found both with integration between Drupal Commerce and Hosted PCI. While this is a fairly new integration between Commerce and Hosted PCI, our developers were able to contribute back to the Drupal Community code which helped this solution become a hands-down awesome choice for Drupal sites.
QuickBooks
SPI’s business needs required all transactions to make it into Quickbooks through the use of its web connect API. To make things more challenging, we needed to map single orders within drupal to multiple invoices within quickbooks and accrue the revenue at the time of service. Our goal was to automate as much of this as possible to save countless man-hours and streamline this process.
NEWMEDIA developers were able to fundamentally change the landscape of Drupal to Quickbooks integration. Working from some untested and rarely used code, they were able to help build up a Drupal to Quickbooks integration module using Quickbooks built-in web connect API. Even with the new Commerce Quickbooks Webconnect module, there were still a lot of very tough tasks to integrate into Quickbooks. The diagram below shows you the complexity and thoroughness our team went through.