Overview
Our client offers various high-quality surface preparation and safety products, each with unique attributes. Their offerings feature diverse characteristics like size, color, and material, with some products having over 100 unique details.
They plan to switch content for U.S. and Canadian visitors based on location. Their current Hubspot CMS site supports corporate content and product catalogs but lacks scalability and eCommerce functionality.
Key challenges include overcoming Hubspot’s database limitations to handle complex product attributes, ensuring region-specific product availability, and implementing advanced search functionality. They also aim to transition to eCommerce while maintaining Hubspot CMS for corporate content, requiring seamless integration.
After unsuccessful initial implementation attempts with other eCommerce solution providers, the client contacted Virtina to enhance product management, integrate eCommerce, and improve search functionality. These efforts aim to deliver a scalable, high-performance platform tailored to their operations.
Project Objective
The project focused on enhancing the Hubspot product catalog and integrating it with a robust eCommerce platform to meet our client's growing needs. They wanted to continue using HubSpot as their primary CMS, as they have had an excellent experience with the platform. Magento should be employed for product catalog management, and through custom integration, Magento’s product catalogs should be brought into HubSpot and displayed there.
Requirements and Challenges
The client required their Hubspot product catalog enhancements to better organize their products. They also needed up to 100 unique product attributes, such as dimensions, colors, and materials, each supporting up to five attributes. Advanced search functionality was essential, featuring fuzzy logic, partial matches, and predictive search to improve product discoverability. Additionally, the client managed two separate product catalogs for the U.S. and Canada.
Hubspot’s database had limitations in handling complex hierarchies and extensive attributes. Delivering advanced search functionality within these constraints was another hurdle.
In the second phase, the client needed to integrate their product catalog into Magento to enable eCommerce capabilities. This required preserving product relationships, attributes, and categories during the data integration. They also wanted to keep their corporate pages on Hubspot CMS while integrating product data from Magento, ensuring a seamless user experience across both platforms.
The integration process involved mapping and importing complex product data while ensuring accuracy. Synchronizing Magento and Hubspot in real time posed additional integration challenges.Solutions
Phase 1: Hubspot Catalog Expansion
We expanded the product catalog on Hubspot. We built a custom tool with predictive and fuzzy search capabilities to enhance search functionality, enabling users to locate products quickly based on attributes.
We expanded the product catalog on Hubspot. We built a custom tool with predictive and fuzzy search capabilities to enhance search functionality, enabling users to locate products quickly based on attributes.
Phase 2: Integration With Magento
We recommended Magento as the backend to support eCommerce goals due to its scalability and robust data handling. The product catalog was successfully migrated from CSV files to Magento while preserving complex relationships and structures. Magento’s API was integrated with Hubspot, enabling a dynamic display of product data and seamless updates on the website. We also implemented advanced product search functionality through Magento. We developed a quoting system for users to submit requests directly from product pages, with quote details sent to Hubspot for processing.
Results
Conclusion
Despite challenges like database limitations and complex data integration, we delivered a unified, scalable, and high-performing solution. By leveraging Magento as the backend, we ensured their platform met current needs and positioned it for future eCommerce growth.
