Technologies
Anaheim Automation eCommerce Website
Overview
About Anaheim Automation
Since 1966, Anaheim Automation has been a trusted supplier of motion control and industrial automation components. Its clients range from local packing OEMs to Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries, including biomedical, semiconductor manufacturing, lab automation, and industrial automation. Anaheim Automation specializes in custom solutions and value-added services to find the perfect fit for its customers.
Services
Their Challenge
Anaheim Automation operates in an extremely niche market with highly technical products. Suppliers in this space often treat their online presence as a simple product catalog. Most of these websites were built in the late 90s and early 2000s, and rarely, if ever, updated. Anaheim Automaton was guilty of this, dependent on a website and database built decades ago to attract and retain customers. As time passed, their database became more and more complex, and even the simplest changes required skilled, technical support. The team at Anaheim Automation realized their website was holding them back, and not delivering on their values as a trusted partner to their clients. They needed an upgrade.
Our Solution
Anaheim Automation came to us with one main goal: to improve the user experience on their website. Their customers come to their website for two main reasons: to purchase products and download related product manuals. To upgrade their customer experience, we built a fully mobile responsive website, with a customer portal to view order history, focusing on a visually appealing, easy-to-navigate user interface. As part of the website redesign, we also normalized their existing inventory database and simplified their content management.
Our Approach
What Saritasa Did
Magento eCommerce Platform
Anaheim Automation came to us with a custom, legacy website that was difficult for them to manage content on. We proposed using a platform-based CMS to make it easier for their team to add products, make edits, and manage their content themselves. WooCommerce was too simplistic for its robust inventory and complex product hierarchies, so we opted for Magento 2.
Data Normalization
Anaheim Automation used their original MySQL database to manage their inventory which, over time, became a monster of hard-coded rules and layers upon layers of manual workarounds to add new products without addressing the ever-growing mountain of problems. Our team normalized their inventory, an intensive process that required correcting decades of manually hard-coded rules on top of rules.
Quickbooks Integration
Due to the massive inventory, strict product hierarchy rules, and unique business requirements, this was one of the most complex QuickBooks integrations we’ve worked on. Anaheim Automation sells its products both online and offline, so its inventory needs to automatically update based on real-time data.
Collaborative Testing Process
We could not follow our standard quality assurance testing processes, including automated testing, because of how complex, custom, and manual Anaheim Automation’s existing system was. The client was the only one who knew and understood the nuances and intricacies of the hard-coded rules of their niche inventory, so we worked closely with them to ensure everything worked as expected.
