Olympic Color Rods

A move from Salesforce to Adobe Commerce (Magento)

The Seattle region boasts an impressive portfolio of glass artists, or glassblowers, capturing the attention of many with their intricate creations—from massive public art installations to small votives to take home and enjoy. The Olympic Color Rods website helps make these artistic dreams a reality.

SERVICES PROVIDED

Technical Scoping
Magento Migration
Ecommerce Development

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Meet Olympic Color Rods

Meet Olympic Color Rods

Many glassblowers get their materials from Olympic Color Rods, a Seattle-based supplier of raw glass materials—the rods, frits, and powder forms of color glass that go into the furnace, melt and eventually become beautiful works of art with an artist’s touch. Olympic Color Rods has grown to one of the largest suppliers of glassblowing color and tools in North America and recently found itself needing a new ecommerce storefront to increase efficiency and better serve its customer base.

Their previous ecommerce platform, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, never really fit their business, so it was time for a change. After delving into their business needs, Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) offered the best fit for their company and could help create efficiencies around order management for the OCR team.

The Challenge

We start every project with a scoping phase, identifying the tech stack and integration plan for the whole system. Olympic Color Rod’s ecommerce storefront, like every website we build today, is connected and integrated with many series of systems—from marketing technologies, CRM or ERP integrations, analytics, and more.

First, we identified the migration paths from Salesforce Commerce Cloud and outlined key integrations that would be required. This project was laser-focused on re-platforming quickly, not redesigning the experience. This is what we call internally a “lift and shift,” where a website is moved from one environment to another without redesigning the application, and with no downtime.

Product inventory migrated to Adobe Commerce

The Solution

The core branding, primary navigation, catalog and product detail pages, plus mobile and desktop experience all started to take shape quickly on the front end.

Most ecommerce storefronts we build are selling complete items where 1 is typically the minimum unit. With Olympic Color Rods, the rods are priced by the kilogram and are sold in units down to .25 kg, so the units on the product detail page are needed to support decimal values. Luckily, this is a feature that Adobe Commerce supports. Since the actual weight of the rods can vary slightly (like buying meat at the deli counter), they needed the ability to adjust to actual weights after the order was pulled, weighed, and packed.

We went with Mageplaza’s Edit Order extension with some custom development to create this functionality since other extensions would only allow editing in non-quantity fields or during a certain status of the order flow. Along with Adobe Commerce’s configuration to allow decimal quantities in products, we were able to use the extension to edit the quantity once the picked amount of the ordered product is actually weighed by a member of the fulfillment team.

olympic color rods site on various device browsers

The Results

A condition that added to the complexity of this was that Olympic Color Rods customers can order specific decimal increments (.25, .50, etc) through the website, though a member of the fulfillment team can also adjust the quantity while processing the order. We added a text attribute to display the increment information when a simple product from the configurable product page is chosen to account for both of these conditions. This behavior is not native to Magento and we had to customize the display of that messaging.

Additionally, when using this extension, we found it would cause a dual authorization in Olympic Color Rods' payment gateway, EBizcharge, due to the extension ‘creating a new order’ when a quantity is edited. Our team did additional custom development to only send one authorization to their payment gateway. Used in parallel with Moogento Pick Pack, the edit order extension allows Olympic Color Rods to view the ordered products in alphabetical order while providing the ability to edit the quantities as needed.