How Engine Room Amplified E-Commerce Technologies for a Global Software Company

Executive Summary

A global software company partnered with Engine Room to integrate their highly technical and multi-faceted digital landscape. After partnering with Engine Room on a different web development and design project, the client returned for a large-scale rebuild of their e-commerce platform.

For this new project, Engine Room was tasked with integrating their e-commerce technologies to include coordinating and automating multiple API technologies. These enhancements would facilitate organizational administrative needs and support a seamless customer experience. Ultimately, the client sought to increase automaticity, enhance productivity, and reduce time and financial costs by transforming their e-commerce landscape.

Expanding Our Partnership with This Global Client

Engine Room originally partnered with this client on another project focused on rewriting their annual subscription platform and building out supporting web pages. After seeing the results, the company returned, seeking out Engine Room’s expertise to integrate their complex e-commerce platform. More specifically, Engine Room automated and streamlined their numerous technologies to optimize interdepartmental and business performance as highlighted throughout this case study.

Navigating a Complex, Highly Technical Digital Landscape

One unique aspect of this quality was the highly technical nature of integrating multiple e-commerce applications to streamline and enhance their digital platform performance. Engine Room began by getting to know the client’s complex digital landscape.

Originally built by another agency on WordPress with various plug-in features, application programming interface (API) technologies were gradually added or adapted to meet the various marketing, customer experience, and accounting needs. Ultimately, this left the client with several varied but interdependent applications that needed to be integrated to maximize functionality and operational efficiency.

Examples of key APIs used on the site include:

• Recurly, a 3rd party subscription software to annually process client memberships.
• Adyen, a credit card processor software to process payments.
• Vertex, an API for calculating the unique tax based on the customers’ state or country of purchase when completing initial and recurring transactions.
• Practitioner, a software that monitors and ensures subscribing members have access to their active software.
• PING – Federated Identity and authentication
• SAP software to support company accounting needs.
• Identity Management Software (IMS) to facilitate and organize customer login and accounts for purchases.
• Snowflake, a platform that allows re-sellers of the client’s software to access customer data to facilitate additional sales.

Though each software works to fit a unique organizational or customer experience need, they operate harmoniously to support the client’s purchasing, renewal, software licensure, and administrative needs. A breakdown in one piece of the automated software chain would cause a domino effect, impacting several other simultaneous and downstream functions. Engine Room conducted ample data logging and collection to evaluate and ensure that each automating technology was accurately and seamlessly integrated. Our team meticulously and skillfully executed this highly technical e-commerce platform redesign.

Problem-Solving without Having All the Answers

Because of the highly technical nature of orchestrating multiple technologies, the clients themselves were challenged to fully understand and synchronize their e-commerce capabilities. This ultimately meant that Engine Room had to problem-solve a complicated situation without having all the answers or a single knowledge source.

As a result, the team and project tech lead, in particular, spent months meeting with various client stakeholders, vetting and evaluating the initial technical design, and bolstering their understanding of the API to plan for and adjust changes being made. Dedicating this time and effort to learning and understanding the client’s technological environment was vital to supporting our problem-solving and solution-building efforts.

Aligning Technological Capabilities with Stakeholder Needs

Without an in-house expert on their tech capabilities, some misunderstandings about application abilities and utilization occurred. For example, the Snowflake software is designed to securely store customer data. However, the client wanted to use this software to authenticate data. In these instances, Engine Room had to find innovative ways to align client tech needs and application capabilities.

Providing Ongoing, Comprehensive Support

The extra deep dive into understanding their e-commerce technologies resulted in Engine Room team members becoming the subject matter experts on this client’s platform. Additionally, the complex redesign of multiple e-commerce technologies meant that ongoing adjustments were needed to stabilize the platform after the launch date.

Our role as technical experts and remediators resulted in months of continued support and expanded to assisting the client across 10 other websites with shared technologies. Being a consistent presence to address client issues and concerns has allowed Engine Room to facilitate continuity of services, provide comprehensive results, and navigate a plan for gradually transitioning digital maintenance responsibilities to in-house client experts.

Streamlining and Automating E-Commerce Tech to Save Valuable Time and Resources

After months of learning, troubleshooting, and thoughtful designing, Engine Room provided the client with a transformed e-commerce platform. We were ultimately able to facilitate their processes by:

• Streamlining their technology and e-commerce applications.
• Automating processes and removing manual work demands.
• Ensuring data continuity across each step of purchasing, payment, and renewal.

These changes increased cohesiveness and efficiency across all of the client’s interdepartmental software (e.g., SAP for accounting, Snowflake for customer data, and Adyen for purchasing). Streamlining and automating their technologies helped to save time and money spent on administrative tasks while also improving the customer experience.

Testimonials from Our Global Software Client

Our team was proud of the skilled work and expertise we offered throughout this project. We are even more proud of the client’s responses to the results and professionalism Engine Room provided throughout this journey. Here’s what our global partners had to say about this project.

Let Engine Room Simplify and Optimize Your Technologies

Engine Room is passionate about improving your digital landscape to help your company be more efficient, productive, and successful. No matter how technical or multifaceted the context may be, our team of experts is ready to handle it.

To learn more about how Engine Room can help you, book a free consultation today.