Let the light in. Illuminating a new digital commerce space.

A brighter architectural spotlight

Forming an extension to an internal operational digital transformation initiative underway, Ridgeway was tasked with architecting and building a new central eCommerce platform.

This involved conducting a series of collaborative workshops and a comprehensive discovery phase to gain a holistic understanding of the online landscape, supplier digital services and customer profiles. The composable scope encompassed evaluation, curation, and end to end data delivery through various critical components, including product data inventory and management, CRM, ERP, UX taxonomies and user flow, brand, core payment services, and inherent DXP features shaped to provide the right platform marketing capabilities and ensure overall scalability.

Overall, the solution functionality extended to include a wide and varied set of the Kentico platform that was ideally placed to provide:

Taxonomies and tagging

• An "Expert Advice Centre" blog area was created on the site, allowing filtering of blog posts by primary and secondary subjects using tags
• A blog indexed in Azure search, enabling search by author, tags, and blog post content

Email marketing campaign builder

• Email marketing was configured on the site, and editorial widgets were developed to be included in email campaigns
• These widgets showcased featured products, articles, and customisable call-to-actions
• Multiple email templates were created to target different audience segments, such as trade club members, with different styling based on their membership level
• Kentico Contact Groups were used for segmentation based on newsletter subscription types.

Custom roles and scheduled role assignment

• Loyalty ‘Trade Club’, Blue, Silver, and Gold tiers were established based on custom user roles, influencing the personalisation and functionality of the site
• Custom scheduled tasks were implemented to automatically move users between trade tiers based on their spending over a configurable period

Product relationships

Several complex relationships and fell into the following categories:

• Products that would be automatically applied to the shopping basket when X product is added
• Products that would be recommended alongside X product
• Products that were essential to be purchased with X product

Editorial control with page builder

• Customisable brand pages were created to serve as portfolios for each brand, allowing the inclusion of editorial widgets to showcase products, articles, content text media, and call-to-action widgets

Microsoft Azure smart search

• Two Azure smart search indexes were built using Azure Cognitive Search
• These indexes facilitated detailed indexing and searching of products and articles, as well as providing faceted searching for a complex product catalogue

Localisation throughout

• The site was built with a focus on localisation, allowing for easy extension to support new languages

Custom shipping carriers

• Custom shipping carriers were developed to accommodate pricing requirements based on the cart total and the trade club level

Custom discount macros

• Custom macros were developed to implement bespoke discount rules for specific scenarios

Core API integrations

Several key integrations were undertaken providing a flexible and composable architecture:

Akeneo

• Integration with the Product Information Management (PIM) system with a custom product import tool
• Kentico workflows were utilised to ensure product approval before publishing

Worldpay

• Integration with the payment provider for card and PayPal payments
• Customisation of Kentico to handle order status updates at an order-line level
• Development of a bespoke Worldpay integration allowing partial refunds and cancellations

PCI Pal

• Integration with Worldpay and the CMS Customer Service checkout
• Enablement of secure payments over the phone through the CMS
• Managed full Worldpay payment communication post-transaction between Worldpay and Kentico

Business Central

• Integration with Kentico via a two-way API
• Sending of newly authorised orders, refunds, and cancellations from Kentico to Business Central
• Management and fulfillment of orders through Business Central
• Kentico provision of APIs for Business Central to update product stock on the site

HubSpot

• Assembly of all contact forms on the site with HubSpot as tickets using a custom integration
• Transferred consenting contacts to HubSpot
• Custom fields created in HubSpot to align with the solution's requirements

Voucher Express

• Development of a VEX points allocator that assigned rewards to email addresses based on trade club level and order total

As part of the project delivery, full migration scripts were also developed to transfer data from their outdated, custom database to a new system. In parallel to full end-to-end point testing, training plans were developed for each operational stream in readiness for final content management, campaign set-up and ‘Go-live’.