Objectives
Arrowhead came to us with a large list of e-commerce objectives and they knew that we were the right fit from the start. The objective was to create a very large e-commerce site and several other mirror sites with large amounts of products. We were to provide design, programming, hosting, and marketing services. The site would need to be deployed in 2-3 months.
Import Systems
The Arrowhead website runs Magento as a backend, but the store contains over 35,000 products. We constructed a product import and category import system that regularly updates stock levels, prices, and product/ manufacturer information. Since there are so many products, we had to modify Magento in certain ways so that it could support the stress of indexing all the content. All of the import systems are fully automated and run timers via cron jobs that execute the indexing operations in a linear fashion after an update occurs.
AJAX Systems
We created new and exciting ways for Arrowhead to implement landing pages for search engines, including a custom AJAX system that integrates directly with the Magento CMS. We also branched our import system to download CSV files from external servers and execute mulitple import operations tied to multiple data sources and ERP systems.
SEO
We were also tasked with migrating traffic from an older site to the new one, which had to be done in an SEO friendly way. So a custom integration was created that allows the user to checkout from one site to another, or recommends alternate products for discontinued ones. We created import processes that set the Metadata for all product pages automatically, and we will be using a similar system to create Google Adwords campaigns and ads. We have already launched the site and achieved a PageRank of 4 on this site in Google. The entire launch process took only 3 months including the SEO.
Price Checking
Another system we are constructing for Arrowhead that will surely blow your mind is an automated Google Merchant Central price checking algorithm that will automatically go through all 35,000 products and apply price reductions for certain groups. It is designed to check Google for comparable product prices, find the lowest one, and then set the Arrowhead products below that marker. Then it pushes the content automatically back to Googlebase. This will happen with regular frequency, and all price reductions are logged for accuracy checking.
ICECAT Integration
One great challenge of the Arrowhead project was the ability to get rich content and specification sheets about the products that are offered. This data comes from a project called Open ICECAT. We were tasked with importing and display this data, which is accomplished with several backend XML import systems.
Google Adwords *NEW*
Phase 4 of the Arrowhead project involved us creating a custom automation script that pushes all Arrowhead products to Google Adwords in the form of over 400,000 ads. This process runs in the background pusing over 5,000 ads per day directly through a Google API. The script creates custom keywords based on the product data, and assign bids automatically. Each product is its own adgroup, each adgroup is assigned specialized terms and 10 ads each. This phase was completed in 2 weeks with testing.
Conclusion
Overall, this multi-phase project has become one of the largest e-commerce operations we have worked to develop. The launch was completed on time and the budget guidlines were met. The client continues to be exceedingly pleased with the services we offer and we're certain this relationship will grow far and wide over the coming years.
Hire Us!
If we can do this much for Arrowhead, imagine what we can do for you! Why not hire Foundco for your next project? Get started today by requesting more information from our staff.
