Coastal Shower Doors

Ordering Portal Enhancements

MANUFACTURING

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— Custom API integrations

— UX/UI enhancements

/ 01

Introduction

Coastal Shower Doors, a designer and manufacturer of bath and shower enclosures, engaged with Station Four to improve the data import process of the product catalog and the export of the orders within their ordering portal.

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/ 02

The Challenge

APIs were used to process the import and export processes within the system hosted by Coastal. Original architecture resulted in adding and updating significant amounts of data, resulting in timeouts and errors within the ordering portal. Legacy code was being relied on to manually trigger imports on a platform that was no longer being utilized by Coastal. 

 Additional Enhancements

  • Adding images to the catalog using API processes via a file server hosted by Coastal
  • Update the design of the customer-facing ordering portal

 

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/ 03

The Build

Station Four suggested a better user experience by implementing the following enhancements.

  • Move the import and export processes away from the Ordering Portal application and implement background processes to improve the Ordering Portals performance as well as the success rate of the processes
  • Integrate product images using the products endpoint and display them on the Ordering Portal
  •  Refresh the look of the customer-facing side of the ordering portal. This includes a minor refactor to the backend code which is outdated and unorganized.
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/ 04

Quick Wins with Phased Rollouts

Because of the large scope of the project, S4 worked in phases to launch the enhancements. First, executing the backend work to improve import and export processes, eliminating timeouts and errors. Improvements to ordering allowed customers and representatives a better experience using the Ordering Portal. 

The second phase was the design enhancements of the customer ordering portal. The addition of images allowed a visual representation of the catalog. Using an API call to auto populate the images, the Coastal team could update pictures without manually uploading pictures to separate pages, saving time and money. 

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/ 05

Additional Enhancements

Since this engagement, S4 has worked with Coastal to continue to improve their Ordering Portal. Additional improvements include the addition of ACH and Credit Card payments, and the ability to pay multiple invoices. These improvements have helped make the overall purchase experience of the Coastal customers.

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