Ivyside
New CBD Marketplace Hits the Ground Running
Meet Ivyside
Ivyside, a subsidiary of the publicly-traded Canadian company Tilray, set out to create an eCommerce marketplace for CBD products that benefit their customer’s active lifestyles while layering in education about the health and wellness benefits of cannabinoid-based remedies.
Marketplace + Magento
Ivyside is an online marketplace—a “superstore” of sorts that carries many brands under a single umbrella. Think of it as one large department store, where customers can shop by category, by brand, or by health benefit for products from many different companies.
When they approached us, the Ivyside team had built a site internally using NopCommerce but quickly realized they needed to move to Magento Commerce instead to fully support their marketplace vision. Magento fits the bill for this type of marketplace store.
The Build
Ivyside wanted to quickly launch their new brand ID designed by Heckler Branding and worked with our longtime partner Fell Swoop to create the interactive wireframes and page layouts for their new commerce marketplace.
We created a full technology stack and implementation plan in our scoping phase with Ivyside, and with the blueprint and design in hand, we got to work—completing the store build, Magento custom theme development, catalog setup, and integrations with various commerce tools like payment gateways, fulfillment and tax.
We built out the integration with Ivyside’s Accumula ERP, which handles all order fulfillment and accounting. Other custom development included a zip code checker (CBD can’t be shipped to all zip codes), product comparison charts, gating for checkout, and a contextual product attribute display for configurable products.
CBD Tracker
One of the interesting aspects (and challenges) of CBD, is that it takes several weeks of consistent use to experience its effectiveness. To help customers track their progress and note benefits, Ivyside worked with our team to create a CBD tracker tool.
This is a React JS web application, based on the interactive wireframes provided by Fell Swoop. It has a tight integration with Magento, so customers can track based on the products they purchased, storing this data with their main customer account at Ivyside.
All said, the new commerce website included approximately 30 pages built using Magento’s Page Builder tools. They now have a solid foundation for growth as they roll out additional marketing initiatives in the future.
“It's rare that you can find a group of people that are very talented and communicate really well. That's the reason we chose Bear Group initially and that's just stayed consistent the whole time. It's just been a real pleasure to work with them.”
Ryan Basford, Ivyside (Tilray)