Mayflower Distributing
Magento Commerce with abas Integration
Meet Mayflower Distributing Company
The balloons and party supplies in your local grocery store, party store, or online retailer very likely could've come from Mayflower Distributing Company. As the leading B2B distributor of balloons, helium, party supplies and food service products in the United States, Mayflower has a huge catalog and inventory to choose from.
The Mayflower team came to us needing to migrate inventory, customers, and order history into the cloud version of Magento 2 from Magento 1 while maintaining their integration with abas ERP.
Integration with abas ERP
As a B2B-only website, Mayflower's customers need to establish an account with the company before they are able to make purchases on the website. The website essentially functions as a "front-end" for the abas ERP.
Accounts are first established in abas, where a customer’s terms and pricing categories are managed. When a customer logs into Magento, an abas ID connects the Magento account with the abas account. This integration controls dynamic pricing (at the product level), populates saved addresses, payment methods, and more.
Search-Friendly Front-End
On the website's front-end, we used the Magento base theme as a starting point (rather than a fully custom design)—saving Mayflower time and budget. We also took advantage of Magento's page builder tools to easily build carousels and general content pages.
With such a large catalog, the website's search functionality is highly utilized and an important feature so customers can quickly find the products they need. We chose Celebros, a third-party search engine that creates a continual index, offloading to AWS Elasticseach, and provides a great visual interface for search results along with top products and disambiguation matches.
Data & Customer Migration
Moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2, we used the standard Magento Migration API. This had to be customized because of the differences in the way customer accounts were managed between versions. We didn't need to re-migrate the products as part of our go-live steps, rather we were able to re-migrate and “cherry pick” the tables we needed.
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Migrate Magento 1 data into the empty Magento 2 site.
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Delete customer/sales data from (local) copy of Mayflower Magento 2 database.
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Export tables we're interested in from migrated Magento 2.
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Import into local Mayflower Magento 2, verify customer records against the live version.
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If #4 looks good, export data from local and import into the cloud.
Ready for New Heights
With their website migrated, better integrated, and launched, Mayflower Distributing Company is now able to focus on taking their balloon and party supply business to new heights. We’re thankful to have had the opportunity to help the Mayflower team and build a strong relationship with the abas ERP team during the process.
Ongoing Run State Support
Launching a website is just the beginning. Ongoing support is critical for an eCommerce business like Mayflower Distributing Company, so they are part of our Run State post-launch support program where we’re able to proactively monitor their website and quickly respond to any small fixes and feature improvements that come up along the way.