Bounteous (formerly Demac Media)

BACKGROUND

Can you give me a brief description of what your company does.

We are a retailer of basically multi-channels.  We have bricks and mortar online, retailer of baby gear and accessories.  So strollers, car seats, everything fun... sort of, kids three and under.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your main goal or objective going into the project with Demac?

Our objective was basically to create one of the largest baby e-commerce sites in Canada.

Did you already have an e-commerce site up before this?  Were they doing an upgrade or completely new system?

Yes.  We were like a lot of smaller.  We call them bricks and mortar retailers that basically had attempted to do e-commerce but had never really done it properly.  We had a site running for about two years and we weren't doing a very good job of it.  We didn't have the dedicated resources and inventory and the site itself just wasn't doing what we needed it to do.  So we were basically looking for a strategic partner to sort of go to the next level and get us pointed in the right direction.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of the project and what parts was Demac involved in?

They were basically -- the main thing was our full website design, the actual site coding and all that type of stuff.  There is a bunch of custom stuff that we needed that Magento didn't do out of the box so for example, in our business, baby registries or gift registries are a huge component.  And at that time, that was three and a half years ago, Magento didn't even have that functionality.  They had introduced that in enterprise since then.  But even the enterprise version that they have today is really weak.  So we had to do a lot of re-architecture, stuff like that and then we basically wanted full integration between our ERP software and Magento so we had to extend a lot of the Magento API functions and rebuild a bunch of it because it just didn't work properly.  So we spent a lot of time basically building up for example, like we did a registry add-on and then we had to build a whole API for the registry add-on, you know, things like we use considerable products.  Magento's API didn't handle configurable products so we had to basically rewrite their API to handle all that type of stuff so it could talk to our ERP system properly.  Two-way order, Magento still doesn't do that and we wrote all custom made extentions and everything to handle two-way order processing and all those types of things.

And what ERP system are you guys using?

We use a system called Blue Link.  It's a Canadian company out of Vaughan.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How happy are you with the work that Demac Media has done so far?

Very happy.  And they're a huge component to our business.

Do they continue to do ongoing maintenance or upgrades?

We're constantly doing stuff.  We're a little different than a lot of companies.  We believe that technology is sort of what takes you to the next level so other companies like us are always investing in technology.  For example, we're about four weeks away from our fully responsive Magento site.  Again, that has been a ton of work just getting it working given the amount of integration and custom and things that we have.

How happy are you with Magento as a platform?

Magento has been a pretty good platform.  It basically -- they continue to grow as a company and continue to do things.  I think they're still -- it's still mind boggling to me that they have not introduced some of the base functionality that even we have and have had to continue to customize and tweak.  Other company... obviously, it's one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies out there.  We've got a massive install base but to me, it blows my mind that people don’t meet out of the box the stuff that we've had like a two-way order and it’s like... I don't know how people live without that.

When working with Demac, is there anything that you find to be unique or special compared to other consultants or developers you've worked with?

With Demac, we've been able to enter into an agreement where it's not a typical software relationship, where we pay them X to do something and they get Y.  They've actually become more of a strategic partner with us.  And they’ve basically invested and are working closer with us than they do a lot of other companies would.  So I mean, we’re in communication with them on basically almost a daily basis.  We're constantly doing stuff.  They have taken a really big interest in our business and the success of our business.  And they're constantly also helping us come up with ideas to help us. So for example, their President will even sit in some of our marketing meetings and help us plan on things that we can do; give us, sort of, like the real world scenario right on the fly when we come up with ideas saying if the things are possible or not.  For us, again, technology is a huge component of enabling us to go where we want to go.

Is there anything that you would do differently a second time around or think that they can improve on?

If I had to do some things differently, I'd never would have gone on Magento Professional.  I would have gone right to Enterprise because the code change from Professional to Enterprise was so much freaking work and we blew so much money on that.  It was just pure stupidity.  Magento shouldn't have even released Professionals.  They're going to keep it around for two years.  So I definitely would have -- would definitely change that.  I would have just gone invested in Enterprise off the start so that we didn't have the drastic code change.  And other stuff, no.  We're pretty happy with the way things are going.