Doors Direct: A Website Improvement and Migration Journey from nopCommerce 4.3 to 4.4

Background and Challenges

Doors Direct is South Africa’s one of the leading online stores for wooden windows and doors. With a market experience of over 35 years, Doors Direct is one of the prominent distributors of wooden doors and windows in South Africa. nopStation upgraded its website from nopCommerce version 4.30 to 4.40 and implemented a bunch of features on top of the existing solution.

Doors Direct already had a custom solution of nopCommerce version 4.30 and they wanted to migrate their website to nopCommerce version 4.40 along with some modifications to their solutions. However, due to the older version nopCommerce and lack of access to parts of the customized source code, the development team at nopStation faced several challenges related to the identification of the existing customizations, migration of the existing features, and implementation of additional features.

Migration of existing website features to version 4.40 without access to the customized source code: Throughout the Doors Direct website migration process, one of the biggest challenges for team nopStation was the lack of access to the source code of the website on nopCommerce version 4.30.

Performing Modifications on nopCommerce Source code: One of Door Direct’s core requirements was to allow the customers to search for the customer’s town location names under the City field as a selectable drop-down list from search, instead of showing only the city names under the State/Province. As the default nopCommerce implementation does not provide the functionality of Town locations as a dropdown list, implementing this feature presented a challenge for team nopStation and required nopCommerce source code modification.

Integrating functional shipping methods for the newly migrated site: Doors Direct had two shipping methods integrated into their previous solution. However, team nopStation did not have the latest source code for these existing shipping methods, having to instead work with an older non-functional version of the code, which presented a major challenge for team nopStation.

Our Solution:

Team nopStation had done extensive R&D to identify existing customizations on Doors Direct website to propose design and develop solutions according to their business requirements. Due to our team's collective efforts and dedication, we were able to fulfil the requirements of Doors Direct.

Creating functional and user-friendly UX for the new site: After a careful breakdown and analysis of Doors Direct’s business requirements and brand identity, team nopStation chose its Cape Town theme for nopCommerce due to its adaptable and responsive design for the newly migrated website. Team nopStation followed an Agile development process throughout the development lifecycle to incorporate the feedback from Doors Direct and ensure customer satisfaction.

Town address selection functionality under the City field: Our development team performed R&D on this functionality and produced a solution through default nopCommerce source code customization, that included a dropdown functionality to let the customers select their respective towns based on predefined available locations of the cities.

Integration of functional shipping methods: As the source code provided for the shipping methods was an older version, team nopStation had to use reverse engineering to implement shipping functions for the new site as well as implement required modifications.

Implementing “Ask for Quote” functionality: Team nopStation has developed a custom plugin that allows customers to ask for a price quote for products. This plugin enabled customers to request a quote for a product. On the admin panel, the shop admin can see a detailed list of all requests and answer them. This plugin helped in converting potential customers into loyal customers.

Results

• Increased accessibility and functionality through implementing a more convenient address selection solution and quote request functionality
• Helped the company showcase its product line to potential online customers and route prospective customers to offline stores
• Post implementation of the solution, the number of new users increased by around 10%
• Improved the website design, brand identity and user experience by introducing a robust and responsive theme

nopStation is a Gold solution partner of nopCommerce and an eCommerce unit of Brain Station 23 Ltd., a top-ranking software development company of 600+ people, headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At nopStation, we design, build and enhance eCommerce solutions on top of the nopCommerce platform for clients of all business sizes. We help our customers build their business online by developing the right eCommerce solution using nopCommerce at a competitive price and reasonable timeline.