A storefront bolted to the side of a website

The problem

The site came to us mid-rebuild. The CMS was standing but largely empty, so the marketing team had been populating it themselves. Ecommerce ran on a separate hosted storefront bolted alongside it, connected to the ERP by a link that could not be relied on, which left the catalogue and the store as two systems pretending to be one. Customers hit it before anyone internally did: adding to cart punched out to a different domain with different branding, and there is no way to know how many of them assumed the site had been hijacked and closed the tab. Underneath all of that, hazardous products carry obligations a normal checkout ignores, and installation is exactly the thing contractors get wrong when a PDF is all they have.

What we built

• Took over the existing build, stabilised it, and got the content model working the way it had been promised
• Migrated commerce off the hosted platform and onto Craft Commerce, so the catalogue and the storefront share one system instead of syncing between two
• Rebuilt the ERP integration so fulfilment sees orders without manual entry
• Built cart-aware hazmat detection that fires only on the orders that need it, capturing registration and arbitration acknowledgement at the right moment
• Kept the ordering path unchanged for everything that isn’t regulated
• Built an automated support assistant grounded in their own product data rather than a generic model
• Stood up a reporting suite in a week, spanning online performance through to ERP-level analysis, because the access and the system knowledge were already there
• Built a programmatic video studio where an instructional reel is defined as a configuration file: narration synthesised, captions aligned to the audio word by word, brand treatment applied, music mixed, and the finished cut assembled without an editor

Result

• One system, instead of a storefront bolted to a website
• Checkout stopped throwing shoppers onto a different-looking domain mid-purchase
• A reporting suite spanning the storefront and the ERP, live in a week because we were already inside both
• Compliance handled by the system rather than by a person remembering
• Installation video in production now, built to scale across the product line rather than one shoot at a time
• Years of continuous ownership covering maintenance, features and a platform migration, rather than a project that ended at launch

Automation running here

• Compliance that fires only when it mustHazmat obligations detected from cart contents, forcing registration and capturing acknowledgement only on the orders that actually require it. The rule is enforced by the system rather than remembered by a person.
• Product video built as a pipeline, not a shootAn instructional reel is a configuration file. Narration is synthesised, captions are aligned to the audio word by word, brand treatment and music are applied, and the finished cut assembles itself. The second video costs a fraction of the first, which is what makes covering a whole product line realistic.
• A support agent grounded in real product dataAn automated assistant answering from a manufacturer’s own catalogue and documentation rather than a generic model, so the specification questions that used to interrupt the sales team get answered correctly at 9pm.
• Reporting that spans the storefront and the ERPOnline performance through to ERP-level analysis in one suite, for a business whose reporting systems had never been able to see each other. Live in a week, because the access and the system knowledge were already there.