WooCommerce to the Rescue

Wood Werks Supply ( aka www.thisiswoodworking.com) is a retail woodworking store planted firmly in the great city of Columbus Ohio. For over 29 years we’ve served the carpenters, contractors, educators and hobbyist with everything they need to work wood. From hinges to hand tools, stationary machinery to lumber, consumer to industrial, Wood Werks has it all.

This client had a legacy Magento 1.9 shopping cart on their website which had to be updated to the new version by the deadline in early 2020 when Magento would cease supporting the older versions.  The site was unstable and they were having a number of problems with basic tasks such as uploading new products or editing existing products. The site was slow and they would often have to upload the same items several times to publish successfully.

When the site was back up and installed in a new server, many of the pages would not load and there were a number of 500 errors.  It was quite impossible to locate the source of these.

One day the production site decided to go wonky and would not allow visitors to complete purchases.  This coincided with the COVID -19 shutdown and a decision had to be made on how to quickly get a site up to allow local customers to make purchases when they were not able to come to the store. Wood Works Supply also has a national reach and they needed to get their products up and fast.

Your Webster was retained and we recommended that the fastest and most tenable solution would be to get a WordPress site built with WooCommerce and add the most popular items first along with information on calling for sales and support. In the interests of time, we skipped the wire framing and design phases and jumped right into an agile process and used the exiting site design with minor modifications as needed. A number of customizations were done to adapt to some of the product requirements. Daily and weekly deliverables were discussed and demo’d in morning report meetings with the client team.

The site was made available for testing in a record 6 days. And, with the help of the client, we were able to get it tested and published 48 hours later.  Development in this manner was not without its challenges as there were a number of variations in business rules and shipping rules by product and by brand.  Still, given the circumstances, this proved to be the best approach. Sales picked up immediately upon launch and a number of large ticket items were sold in the first weeks after launch as we continued to add other products and brands.