Bodybuilding.com
Nutrisystem
Online Retailer
Kodak Gallery
Bodybuilding.com
In April, 2010, Bodybuilding.com selected Commerce Architects to implement a custom ATG Commerce site to replace their existing, home-grown commerce site, which had been in operation for over 10 years. The implementation included ATG Commerce Service Center, ATG Merchandising, and ATG Search with faceted catalog navigation. In April 2011, the new Bodybuilding.com store successfully launched with all of these applications. The new site replicated the original commerce site with improved business logic, performance, and scalability.
Some high-level highlights include:
Core Commerce
The purchase process for Bodybuilding.com allows customers to choose from a variety of payment methods and product types. The new site supports the following payment methods: ATG gift certificates, ATG store credit, Paypal, credit card, and mail-in check. Support was built for the purchase of ATG gift certificates, handling of drop ship items (shipped by a third party), user-selected configurable commerce items, merchandiser-selected configurable commerce items, supplement and clothing items which often include two dimensions, such as size and color or size and flavor. Integrations were built to integrate existing ratings and reviews systems into product display and faceted search navigation. A single-sign-on implementation was developed to allow the ATG application to authenticate against a central service, allowing users to log in on any bodybuilding.com property and to be recognized in the store. To simplify the process of re-ordering items, the user can either re-order an entire previous order or individual items from the order history. In addition to these core commerce features, BCC-administrable content was created to support campaign landing pages, help pages, and generic content pages on the site.
Search
In order to enable customers to find products as easily as possible, bodybuilding.com wanted to leverage ATG's faceted search navigation. This was a highly customized implementation with new catalog properties and custom properties created specifically for indexing, grouping, and faceting. Three separate search types are executed to search SKUs, category, and perform type-ahead prediction. Facet display and behavior were customized to provide faceting using a range slider and complex faceting with product ingredients and their amounts. With ATG Search, Commerce Architects partnered with ATG Professional Services to ensure that the most up-to-date, ATG-recommended architecture and best practices were used.
Merchandising
The ATG Merchandising application and underlying Content Administration server were built as the product and SKU system of record (master). This required an integration with a middle-tier data layer to distribute data updates to financial systems, demand forecasting tools, and other applications that were reliant on catalog data. In addition, due to the nature of the products sold on the site, the standard catalog management workflow required extensions to support FDA approval by an internal team. All ATG assets, including the catalog, images and personalization assets are managed through ATG Merchandising.
Cross-training internal resources
In order to help the internal development team gain the knowledge and ATG skills necessary to support and expand the site in the future, the internal team and the Commerce Architects team were integrated half-way through the project. By the end of the project, the internal development team was able to actively and meaningfully contribute to the codebase.
Seach Engine Optimization
Bodybuilding.com already ranked very high in search engine results for keywords that were central to the business. In order to preserve these high SEO rankings, the new implementation was designed to allow all existing site URLs to be preserve and to continue to be used. All SEO data is now managed through ATG's Merchandising UI, allowing the business to modify and deploy new and updated SEO data at any time.
Order Management
To allow the customer call center to manage orders, Commerce Architects implemented ATG's Commerce Service Center. Extensions were made to support the business and allow them to manage customizations made to users and orders on the site. A custom fulfillment implementation was built to integrate with the Warehouse Management System, allowing orders to be passed to the warehouse system and order statuses and inventory information to be returned to ATG.
Deployment
The site was deployed successfully with no site down time and minimal disruption to the business. ATG's best practices were followed, including extensive performance testing, to ensure a smooth launch and transition to an entirely new, scalable, and expanded e-commerce platform.
Nutrisystem
The Nutrisystem project provides examples of our work as deployment specialists, Content Administration experts, performance tuning engineers, and Commerce application developers. In addition, it showcases delivery models including a single engineer working in a specialized role as well as an embedded development team working together with Nutrisystem developers to build new functionality.
We first became involved with Nutrisystem as they were approaching site launch. After conducting a launch readiness assessment, we discovered the application was not ready to run in a production environment. After guiding them through the setup and configuration of lock servers, process editor servers, fulfillment servers, content administration servers, and configurations required to run multiple instances of the application, they were ready to launch. This work required both deployment specialist and Content Administration expertise.
After site launch, some performance issues arose in the production environment. We analyzed the application code as well as the cache settings and recommended changes that brought the site up to a high level of performance and stability.
Over the following year and a half, we worked together with Nutrisystem developers on a series of small projects to implement core commerce functionality and integrations with third party systems. These projects included from 1-3 Commerce Architects engineers working together and mentoring Nutrisystem developers. Over the course of this year and a half, every one of the Nutrisystem developers worked with and learned from Commerce Architects developers.
This work was done remotely from our offices in Berkeley, CA. We used daily touchpoint meetings to track progress and almost daily desktop sharing to work collaboratively with Nutrisystem developers.
Online Retailer
Our work with this client began as a deployment engagement to address critical performance and stability issues with their recently launched ATG platform. Since launch, the site had experienced server crashes every few days due to at least one major memory leak. Following a brief period of data collection, investigation, and consultation with ATG technical support, several problem areas were identified in custom code and a previously unknown ATG bug was found. After resolving the identified problems, site performance was improved and server crashes were eliminated.
In order to move forward with developing new site functionality, it was first necessary to implement typical development environment best practices, which were missing. At that time, there was no source control, no build and deployment process, and no individual environments for developers. To remedy this, Subversion was installed, a simple build script was created, and an open source continuous integration tool was set up. Additional development and QA servers were set up and a local development environment set up process was created. During the course of this work, several repairs were made to the ATG Content Administration setup and configuration.
During the following 9 months, work involved simultaneously repairing poorly written code left behind by the initial integrator, adding new functionality required by the marketing organization, and continuous improvements to site performance. One critical business need was to further leveraging the ATG Commerce Search and Search Merchandising products. The site was modified to switch from category-product style catalog navigation to search-based navigation allowing complex selection of facets across numerous product properties. The ATG Search engine was also tuned to improve the accuracy of natural language search result to direct customers to key products.
This work was performed remotely from our offices in Berkeley, CA with occasional week-long visits to the customer's site.
Kodak Gallery
At Kodak Gallery we were recruited to help finish up development on a new ATG Commerce site, and help to get the site launched. This project required expertise in ATG Commerce, ATG Content Administration 9, ATG Fulfillment and ATG Commerce Assist.
Since January 2009, we have been engaged with Kodak Gallery with between one and three developers at a time. This engagement model was a hybrid team of developers from Commerce Architects and one additional integrator. The work was performed on-site at the Kodak Gallery office.
Prior to launch, we built the business logic for selling customizable items with ATG Commerce. In addition, we built the workflows and data loading processes for deployment of data from an ATG 9 Content Administration server to ATG 2006.3 Commerce targets. The improvements in the ATG 9 Content Administration application are truly impressive and make this product a pleasure to work with. After launch, some issues were discovered with the implementation of the ATG fulfillment system. As a result, we re-wrote the core of the fulfillment process plus utilities to assist when any fulfillment issues arose. Finally, we implemented ATG Commerce Assist for Kodak Gallery to manage orders.