Swane’s Nurseries: Integrating a Custom Shipping Module Solution With Third Party Supplier eCommerce Shipping Extensions.
Swane’s Nurseries is a business that delivers a range of plants and outdoor landscaping products Australia wide at retail and wholesale levels. The nature of the product sees the product logistically problematic. The solutions COG Digital provided Swane’s Nurseries were largely customised solutions connected to 3rd party softwares. Our solution was to mix both customised Magento plugins with existing supplier softwares.
The brief
COG Digital is proud to deliver the Magento eCommerce CMS Website Development and Support for the Swane’s Nurseries business, primarily the Shipping Matrix and Custom Shipping Module.
Swane’s Nurseries approached COG Digital for a WMA (Website Maintenance Agreement) and to also integrate a complex Shipping Matrix and Custom Shipping Module.
Swane’s Nurseries is a business that delivers a range of plants and outdoor landscaping products Australia wide at retail and wholesale levels. The nature of the product sees the product logistically problematic. There is the delicate structure of plants, needing to remain upright and protecting foliage. Plus, there are different configurations of product and quantities, plus there is biosecurity requirements to ship product interstate. All these elements impacted how the Shipping Matrix and Custom Shipping Module would need to be built and optimized.
The all important consumer front end would need to be considered as any digitization of the Swane’s Nurseries shipping process would include an eCommerce website consumer front end User Experience. Here the customer would have little knowledge (or care) of these factors, though to ensure they checked out would be key to project success.
The client
Swane’s Nurseries is proudly family owned and operated Australian business that began operating in 1919 and has had significant impact on gardens Australia wide and, through their breeding programs, worldwide.
Their flagship plant nursery at Dural sits on 16 hectares and houses not only their garden centre and famous rose gardens but also their plant growing and production areas with extensive shade and glasshouses, and their new rose variety trial garden.
Swane’s Trade desk is at their Dural Garden Centre and offers easy access to thousands of plants for their landscape and building tradespeople.
Grow, Create, Inspire are words that characterise the soul of Swane’s Nurseries, their pride in what they produce, and strive to achieve in the future.
The solution
The solutions COG Digital provided Swane’s Nurseries were largely customised solutions connected to 3rd party softwares. Our solution was to mix both customised Magento plugins with existing supplier softwares.
Our project initially commenced with a PID (Project Initiation Document) and a workshop with stakeholders. COG Digital needed to be certain we understood the Swane’s Nurseries concerns and what they would most need from this integration.
COG Digital found the most appropriate suppliers of shipping modules for Magento 2.0 is Amasty. A solid provider from 1.9 to 2.0 Magento over many years, their customer support and extension documentation ensures confidence in building in a customer shipping module for Swane’s Nurseries. The delivery of the solution needed to include a highly customized and individualized suite of shipping and fulfillment options such as:
The results
Swane’s Nurseries successfully integrated a Custom Shipping Module solution in combination with 3rd party supplier eCommerce shipping extensions for Magento 2 softwares.
Swane’s Nurseries can now sell product on their website and have the shipping matrix automatically calculate for the user on the front end shopping experience. The back end enables prices to be managed automatically and carried through to logistics.
COG Digital provided developer support and stored all customisation in a Git Repo. Ongoing version control was part of the WMA (Website Maintenance Agreement).
The custom shipping module project included UAT (User Acceptance Testing), including pushing the updated website from production to staging then back to production environments, capable of scaling resources for traffic and seasonal traffic fluctuations (I/O usage, CPU and SSD storage space and RAM).
A successful launch into the production environment with statewide customers begging able to purchase products and the shipping and logistics for the business as an automated process via the website.