Appliance Depot
Migrating from Magento 1 Open Source to Magento 2 Commerce Cloud
Appliance Depot is one of the largest distributors of appliance parts and accessories in the Midwest and has been selling and servicing appliances since 1955. They carry a very large inventory of replacement parts and use eCommerce to help customers easily locate and purchase parts for their machines.
The Appliance Depot team came to us needing to migrate their existing Magento version 1 open source site to Magento 2 Commerce and touch up the front-end user experience.
Going from Magento 1 to Magento 2
Magento 1 went “end of life” in July 2020 — meaning Adobe would no longer be providing patches and updates for the system. Magento 2 Commerce is a significant upgrade and improvement, especially on the cloud edition which includes many additional features and bundles in hosting.
Migrations Process
Having done many Magento 1 to Magento 2 migrations over the last three years, we have a well-established migration process starting with a full review of what is currently in place. Typical migrations include:
- Admin configuration (shipping, payments, etc. — Most setting can be moved)
- Products
- Categories
- Product Attributes
- Customers
- Order data
- Reviews
- Third-party/custom extensions
- CMS/Content pages and blocks
All of these areas needed to be moved into the new Magento Commerce site for Appliance Depot. We migrated over 35,000 products from their Magento 1 site to their new Magento 2 build along with thousands of customers, product reviews, and all categories and product attributes.
Special Features
There were several features and improvements made in the course of upgrading to Magento 2.
The Magento 2 Page Builder feature (available in Adobe Commerce) was very helpful for changing the way the content pages and homepage blocks are managed internally.
We added a call to order feature, buy online, pickup at store for large appliances, and support for mixed carts of both appliances and parts.
With an extensive catalog, having a high-functioning search was top priority for the Appliance Depot team to support their customers. It was important that products could be found using brand, part numbers, part categories and for main products to have links suggested for corresponding parts available. The built-in search capabilities of Magento Cloud elasticsearch were leveraged for the big search index.
The new Appliance Depot website launched in March 2021.