Case Study: Rebuilding a Complex B2B eCommerce Site with Magento 2

ESELO is the second largest player in the Latvian electricity products market and a long-time client of scandiweb. ESELO’s clientele includes electrical assembly companies, construction companies, manufacturers, retail companies, shops, and state and local government institutions.

For this project, we launched a PWA B2B eCommerce site on Magento 2 Open Source. Rebuilding a complex system that had been expanded with many custom features over the years—and making everything work together as it should—was challenging. But we made it happen. We successfully launched ESELO’s new website with ScandiPWA without losing traffic or customers. 

Goals & strategy

ESELO wanted to reach more customers and bring their wide range of electrical products to new market segments. Part of the strategy was strengthening its position as an authority in the industry.

We decided to go for a classic website design founded on best practices rather than experiment with trendier approaches. We leveraged content blocks to support SEO goals and rich product descriptions. Of course, delivering an enhanced customer experience with the new site was part of the main goal.

Finally, considering that ESELO’s original site had many custom features, we had to ensure the same functionalities worked in the new platform and that all the integrations ran smoothly.

Scope of work

To achieve the aforementioned goals for ESELO, our work involved:

• Building a B2B eCommerce site on Magento 2 with ScandiPWA theme on top
• Delivering standard eCommerce features, i.e., cart, account, checkout, wishlist
• Ensuring pricing, stock, and product data coming from external systems were complete and accurate
• Creating a middleware to enable client-based tiered pricing
• Klevu search integration
• Enabling three languages in the store views: Latvian, Russian, English
• Displaying 67 categories and even more sub-categories along with different catalogs
• Technical SEO setup

And specifically for the new website design:

• Being consistent with brand colors and other identity elements
• Bringing UI elements to support a feeling of order, structure, and expertise
• Creating wireframes and designs for desktop and mobile
• Delivering the base style within a week and the key layout, in two weeks

Challenges & Approach

Custom middleware

The client-based tiered pricing required by ESELO necessitated the creation of a middleware that did the following:

• Collect raw data from Navision ERP
• Perform price calculations
• Serve calculated prices directly to the frontend

The prices were unique for each client and were calculated based on various pricing rule combinations. The middleware was introduced to handle the heavy calculations and store all product prices per customer. 

Klevu search integration

During implementation, there were compatibility issues between Klevu and the latest versions of Magento and ScandiPWA. We had to fix a lot of bugs and introduce changes to both the frontend and the backend to make the Klevu extension work. For example, product resolvers and new files were added to skip Magento processing if the data came from Klevu. Nevertheless, we made it all work in the end.

Technical SEO

The old website setup was not SEO-friendly and contained a lot of low-value pages with query strings. Also, there was no proper 404 response to missing pages—every page that did not find any resource in the backend was redirected to the homepage. Overall, the site had a poor technical SEO setup.

During the migration, proper 301 redirects were implemented for all product pages and valuable category pages. Pages not valuable for SEO were not redirected and were recommended for removal from the index.

Also read:
Case Study: Successful SEO Migration for Nuclear Blast
Case Study: eCom Marketplace on Magento 2 with ScandiPWA and Unirgy

Results

Despite our challenges, we successfully launched the new ESELO B2B eCommerce store without losing traffic or customers. Post-launch, we continued to monitor the site to polish some features and resolve issues that came up, as expected in such big and complex systems as this one.

Although we saw a minor decrease in clicks during migration, it was considered normal, given the extensive URL changes we implemented. Such a small decrease of around 18% could even be seen as a positive sign that, soon, overall SEO performance could improve. Furthermore, looking at the YOY data, we saw that organic traffic had doubled, which was another good indicator.

We are currently working with ESELO on defining strategic goals for their business and planning major improvements and new features for their B2B customer portal.

Looking for an eCommerce partner to help you with migration and integrations? Get in touch today. scandiweb has developed and migrated hundreds of eCommerce stores over the past two decades. We are ready to take full care of your eCommerce.

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