Situation
Aotearoa Wine Innovations, a consumer focused exporter of New Zealand wine had a legacy PHP5 management application that was hard to maintain, poorly architected and essentially obsolete, due to its use of PHP5. In a world or ever changing regulatory compliance, ensuring systems were up to date was becoming increasingly challenging.
Impact
With the closed borders mandated by the NZ government’s 2020 response to COVID19, no international tourists meant less winery tours and thus less sales to these tourists, and consequently less shipping revenue. Not only did this affect the company, it affected all producers too, especially those with little online presence.
Resolution
Because tourists could no longer visit the wineries, the company elected to build a platform that
could take fine NZ wine to the world. The requirement was for a platform where individual producers would have the ability to manage their own e-cellar door landing page and of course their inventory of wine. Concrete CMS’ powerful advanced permission system together with page approval workflows were key to achieving this. A custom authentication plugin was built that blended the legacy user data with Concrete’s members allowing seamless login across both old and new platforms. The legacy database was redesigned using Doctrine ORM and numerous admin functions recoded to extend the ItemList class, all of which are core Concrete components. All of this was achieved with custom coded overrides and hooks into Concrete’s powerful events architecture, thus ensuring the standard CMS core remained unaltered and could be upgraded. The legacy code was replaced by another instance of Concrete CMS, and the two platforms are able to share common application database access. Thus reporting and regulatory requirements can be produced across both systems.
JeRo's solution enabled WCD to grow enduring sales relationships with international customers while providing a better buying experience. The simplified sales and shipping solution streamlined the cross-border commerce process, making it easier for producers and buyers to interact. The new website's user-friendly design and functionality improved customer satisfaction, resulting in an increase in sales.
By rebuilding their website using Concrete CMS, WCD was able to simplify their sales and shipping solution, providing a better buying experience for international customers. JeRo's custom features, helped WCD to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales. WCD's partnership with JeRo resulted in a successful digital transformation that allowed the company to continue to grow its cross-border commerce services while meeting the evolving needs of modern consumers.
JeRo Internet Engineering is a Tauranga based web design company specializing in cost effective website development. We use Concrete CMS as well as develop custom web applications and shopping carts for Tauranga businesses.
