Case Study: WooCommerce Shop Development: Building Tools for Managing 1900+ Products for B2B and B2C Customers

WP Masters built a WooCommerce shop for Bold Climbing, a retail brand that sells volumes, macros, holds, and other accessories for climbing in North America. Their retail solution covers more than 1900 products. We devised and built backend infrastructure and underlying business logic for it to streamline and optimize inventory management and make the buying & checkout via Bold Climbing simple and robust. 

Client & Challenge 

A client, Bold Climbing from North America, wanted to create an e-commerce shop that would supply people who love climbing and gyms & shops within the niche with materials for climbing walls: volumes, macros, holds, and so on. 

They approached us on Upwork and asked for our expertise in e-Commerce: their WooCommerce shop had to be able to present almost two thousand climbing-related products. After discussing what needs to be done, we figured we would have to solve these challenges: 

• The scale of the shop and variety of products demanded a filtering system that would be technically sophisticated, but easily understandable for an end-user  
• Product cards had to show different variations of the product and their availability clearly
• Checkout required a quickly graspable UI with good data visibility, so customers could see different kinds of the same product they’ve ordered (e.g., volumes of one type & size, but in different colors) with corresponding prices. The interface planning would have to be focused on the reduction of possible confusion 
• Wholesale & individual customers had to see different prices/terms of purchase 

All of these sounded like a lot of fun to solve. Optimization of WordPress for e-commerce businesses is one of our specialties, so we got to work.

Solution

To tackle the tasks in front of us, we:

• Created two types of accounts for Bold Climbing’s customers: a direct-to-customer type for individuals who want to buy climbing products and a business-to-business type, for gyms and shops who want to buy a bunch of products at once. Customers within them, then, see different prices for retail and wholesale purchases — and businesses can do bulk orders. Discounts are calculated differently for these categories, too. 
• Wrote a PHP script that imported item names, prices, and in-stock and out-of-stock status from an Excel sheet to a database connected to WordPress to update the inventory quicker. 
• Integrated the Inventory Management plugin with WordPress. With it, admins will be able to manage products, see the product stock status, prices for B2B and D2C, and other product characteristics within the admin panel. 
• Divided a product database into two segments and connected nodes of those to different types of accounts to display product characteristics for D2C/B2B customers.
• Built a robust and clear filtering system that allows customers to customize their orders without confusing themselves with prices for the same products of different colors.
• Built product cards for the shop to include stock availability for different color variations of a product and the in-stock status of each such variation. Product cards, of course, are connected to a filtering system and inventory. 

Apart from that, we’ve worked hard to translate the business logic we’ve outlined for optimizing the purchasing into the UX. For instance we built checkout to have a very straightforward, unambiguous interface with product-prices breakdown, discount calculations, and product-to-be-bought visibility to increase the transparency of purchasing and, consequently, the probability of making an order (more clarity => more sales). 

Value 

We worked on the project for about a month. During that time, we developed business logic, built server-side infrastructure for the shop and connected it to WordPress, and organized & enhanced the admin panel with plugins and scripts to make the job of people who will manage the shop easier. 

One of our goals was to make sure the e-commerce functionality is simple & robust for future customers of Bold Climbing and businesses that will pick them as a climbing items supplier — and we think we have achieved exactly that. 

A team of a backend developer and a project manager built the architecture of Bold Climbing to handle the existing scale and prepared it for scaling further. It’s easy to quickly add new items categories, items, and their types to the shop. Assigning prices and adding different characteristics to new and existing products is comfortable right now as well. 

Bold Climbing came to us with an idea for a resource, a UI design for it, and a brief outline for its navigation. We helped them turn their WooCommerce shop into a highly performative engine that’s suitable for the management of the business with 1900+ items in the inventory and two types of customers that require different product configurations. We’re pretty proud of this one.