Chukar Cherries
Magento 2 Replatform with Custom Shipping Extension
A Great Pick
Chukar Cherries began in 1988 and quickly became a Pacific Northwest legend for their extraordinary foods and gifts crafted from locally-grown cherries and berries. (Definitely try their chocolate covered cherries — it’s one of the best things you’ll ever taste.)
The Chukar Cherries team reached out to us to help move their website from Magento 1 to the Magento 2 platform.
Kickoff & Scoping
In the first phase of the engagement, we worked with the Chukar Cherries team to understand the current capabilities during a short scoping phase. It turned out there was quite a bit of custom development done over the years on their Magento 1 site along with a fully-custom theme and reliance on many Magento extensions. We formed an upgrade path for each extension along with a data migration plan from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
Chukar Cherries had recently rebuilt the design on their website, so we were able to move that forward to the new platform, commonly referred to as a “lift and shift.”
Site building
During the site building phase, we rebuilt the catalog and product structures as well as the responsive theme. The custom “mega menu” dropdown navigation presented some interesting front-end challenges and was fun to build.
We handled all of the manual migration of content pages like recipes, ingredients, blog, news and other general history pages. This phase included full QA across various devices and browsers.
Custom Development
The custom development phase began once the data migration was complete and a number of highly-custom shipping related modifications were put into place.
The order shipping process — and how that gets presented to customers — is a very unique and custom area to Chukar Cherries. Their product line is seasonal and includes fragile products with a shelf life (that can’t arrive melted), wine, gift orders, and products can only be shipped on specific days as the product is handcrafted.
Custom Shipping & Delivery Date Selector
Customers need to be able to pick delivery timelines and have the ability to ship to multiple addresses, sometimes hundreds of addresses when it comes to corporate gifts. There were many requirements that led to building a custom Magento extension and experience to support their customer and business requirements.
For customers, this resulted in a simple checkout process with delivery date picker embedded. Behind the scenes, there are many business rules at work.
The Chukar Cherries website went live in April 2021, in time to kick off their Mother's Day marketing campaign.