Custom Everything

or A case of building a perfect, huge, complex, flexible, and totally tailored BigCommerce store.

COMPANY PROFILE

PhotoVideoEDU is MAC Group's educational support program. A leading resource for all things photo, film, video and content creation for students and educators of accredited institutions and programs since 1997.

PHOTOVIDEOEDU.COM

Summary

PhotoVideo EDU is a massive website. Twenty brands, seven thousand products, thousands of customers, and a vast number of categories, content pages and educational content.

The project included a new theme built from scratch, data migration, tailored scripts and customizations, and a deep integration with multiple platforms on our client's technical stack.

Approach

The replatform process was quite challenging. Porting from the previous, highly customized and deprecated platform was not an option. We had to start from scratch and make it fast and efficient.

Custom everything

The MAC Group team delivered a beautiful design that challenged us to push the boundaries of a regular BigCommerce theme. For this website, we developed a custom gallery script, integrating video and delivering a a better user experience. We customized image sizes and loading times for better performance.

We also developed a custom variant system, allowing variants to contain unique descriptions, completely separated photo galleries, and a much richer cross-product navigation and upsell with accessories and related items.

Through a smart use of BigCommerce's Metafields we created specific product layouts per brand, requiring zero maintenance from the editors, and conditionally showing or hiding multiple combinations of features, specs, manuals, software, or resources. All of them dynamically populated via Salsify. Going beyond the out of the box platform content options (description and custom fields) we created a deeper experience that adapted to each of the twenty brands resources automatically.

Enroll & Buy

PhotoVideo EDU is a platform for students and educators. As such, it requires a straightforward enrollment process where the customers provide basic documentation and proof of their student status.

Our Enroll platform, based on CraftCMS and seamlessly integrated into the store via API, was adapted to create an easy, frictionless process both for applicants as well as administrators. As soon as an authorized website admin vets the application, the now-approved user is sent into BigCommerce and can immediately login and access her tiered discount prices.

An advanced use of pricelists and multiple customer groups, two fantastic BigCommerce features, allowed for delivering the proper discounts to everyone and facilitating a personalized shopping process.

All wrapped up in a beautiful presentation

It's super easy when your clients have talented designers. Our integration with Zmags made it simple to implement on the homepage, core collection and landing pages, giving the website an extra flair and a striking look and experience. Our custom-built megamenu, advanced optimized front-end code, and Elfsight integrations did the rest. The result is a website that stands above competitors, with beautiful visuals and offers a superb shopping experience.

(Just like)
Starting over

PVE was released with fanfare in early Fall, 2022. The vibrant student, teacher and organization community has been successfuly migrated and is ready to enjoy the offers, promotions and learning material the store has to offer.

With BigCommerce as the cornerstone, the website smoothly integrates into our customer's product inventory manager, marketing platform, and ERP.

A large, tailored eCommerce replatform project achieved in barely four months, and we've only just begun.

We'll continue building features and tools for PVE family through our flagship plan, Fuego.