Bannerheld's Magento Migration and Marketplace Success

Tech stack: PHP, Magento 1, Magento 2, jQuery, Google Service, Nginx, Facebook
Services: Magento Migration, Magento Development
Location: Germany
Industry: E-commerce
Timelines: 10K hours—Ongoing

Overview

Bannerheld is a reliable and competent partner in Berlin when it comes to advertising banners, roll-up banners and foils. The Bannerheld company started in 2008. Today the large-format printing plant has production areas of over 700 m2, on which they work with the utmost emphasis on fulfilling the wishes of over 12,000 regular customers. This – ongoing – rapid expansion was made possible by extensive investments in machinery and marketing measures, IT development in particular through the consistent focus on maximum quality and customer satisfaction.
Bannerheld is IHK-certified training company that trains qualified specialists in the areas of media design, bookbinding as well as printing and prepress.

Prerequisite:

  • Four sites on Magento 1
  • Plans to migrate on Magento 2
  • Plans to create a network (marketplace) with up to 100 sites where Resellers will meet product producers
  • Automatization of manual business
    processes
bannerheld_2

The challenge

Bannerheld approached us in December 2017. The company had 4 stores on Magento 1 and needed to migrate to Magento 2, increasing by 100 sites. They also needed to develop a system for Bannerheld customers to upload their own images for printing. A unique feature of this system was the ability for customers to customize image sizes and formats (or even create their own ones in the online editor) and place an order so that it would go straight to the pressroom. The project immediately presented several challenges. First of all, it was quite a specific industry. We had to figure out how the system should work and how to implement our solution, taking into account all the needs of the client and his customers. The second challenge was the number of original sites, which were highly customized. Even the company itself didn’t fully understand how exactly they worked.
We needed to figure out the system and maintain the initial four sites throughout the entire development.

The solution

Due to the specifics of production, Default Value representatives personally traveled to Berlin for a week to understand all the intricacies of Bannerheld. The future system had a very complex logic, and all the nuances had to be taken into account to develop the right architecture.

Thus, a special system based on Magento was bought, which allows integration with the company’s equipment. That is, it allows the goal of Bannerheld to be realized—so that customer orders could go straight to production. The original system had some complications and hiccups in terms of architecture and working order, but we managed to adapt it to the client’s business needs.

In addition, Bannerheld had another goal — to become a marketplace for other businesses that deal with printing products.
Using Magento 2, we developed a system that collects data from different online stores in one place, processes it, and sends it to the pressroom. We implemented a critically important and complex
feature within this part of the project. The finished system can also synchronize product and price data from external stores. Initially, the client had such an ability, but we developed a convenient interface to work with prices.

bannerheld_2

Thus, based on different Magento versions, we developed a very complex mechanism of working with prices that took into account all possible aspects of the orders: material, print type, size, etc. At the same time, the customer could place orders with different manufacturers at once, and our system automatically sent them notifications, allowing tracking of the status of each order.

Summary

More than 1770 tasks were completed during our cooperation with
Bannerheld—from fixing minor issues and automating manual processes
to migrating to Magento 2. In addition, we implemented a new system
developed from scratch that synchronizes orders between sites via APIs.

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