Classmates.com®
Adobe Commerce Website Integrations with Existing Systems
Classmates®, a division of PeopleConnect, emerged in the early days of the internet boom as a social networking service a whole nine years before Facebook came on the scene. Today the company helps people find members of their high school graduating and other classes and now includes scanned yearbooks and yearbook reprints.
Technical Scoping
Classmates is upgrading its entire technical stack including its commerce systems — replacing its highly-customized Elastic Path commerce platform with Adobe Commerce and integrating with various proprietary platforms/functionalities within the environment.
We kicked off the project in the fall of 2021 with Bear Group’s team of a solution architect, technical project manager, and lead developer doing a deep dive with their team to write a blueprint for their new systems. The resulting technical scope doc included a before and after set of diagrams to help identify the key components that would be replaced as well as intersection points with internal systems.
Platform Choice
Adobe Commerce, a widely-used and highly-customizable ecommerce platform, is a great choice for enterprise-level businesses like Classmates. In addition to its capabilities to support an expansive online storefront, the Adobe Commerce user interface makes handling the complexity of a custom website much easier with a straightforward and intuitive admin panel.
Custom Development
We began work on the custom development and integrations with the new Magento 2 storefront, working closely with the Classmates team throughout the process.
Custom Product Checkout
When a person registers for a free account, they’re able to connect with former alumni by selecting their school and graduation year in the registration process. If a person is interested in purchasing a yearbook, they’ll select whether they want a hardcover or softcover yearbook on the new Adobe Commerce product page and it pulls in the correct yearbook from the product database.
Subscriptions
We built out their new subscription module with Adobe Commerce and their other systems. On the front end, our team developed a custom product page to make it easy to choose a subscription tier while matching the look and feel of their website. Within the admin, the member care team can manage orders and subscriptions.
Additional Payment Gateways
We also helped the Classmates team integrate with additional payment gateways such as PayPal, Amazon Pay, and WorldPay.
I've worked with a lot of vendors and this is, by far, my best vendor experience.
— Erin Kelly, PeopleConnectWe love the unique business and technology challenges projects like this present for the Bear Group team and we have a great track record of success with this type of highly-custom project. The new Classmates.com store features began rolling out for customers in early December 2021 with additional features yet to come.