Launching a Drupal Commerce portal for CureMint

The Goals:

CureMint.io wanted to build an eCommerce platform that would serve as the core of their business. Their key requirements from the project were:

• Set up an eCommerce website that offers a simplified experience for customers and suppliers
• Build separate eCommerce microsites for major DSOs, each showing only a pre-approved set of inventory

The Solution:

The CureMint eCommerce Portal
We helped CureMint team choose the right eCommerce platform. The final solution was to build an eCommerce site with Drupal Commerce that allowed:

• Easy listing for various products from manufacturers and distributors
• Quick product search and simplified selection and checkout
• Email notifications for suppliers for each order placement
• Order viewing and receipt confirmation by customers on the portal
• Streamlined management of all orders placed, with an order-approval mechanism

Delivering Custom Requirements

• Email Notifications: A key challenge with Drupal Commerce is that emails are not delivered to the inbox, and land up in spam. Our teams opted to work around this issue by integrating Sendgrid email solution with Drupal Commerce. This ensured that emails from the CureMint portal were delivered to customer and suppliers’ inboxes.
• Custom Integrations: The CureMint team had certain custom requirements for their key customer and supplier. While these were dropped midway through the project, we managed to deliver some work on them, such as:
  • A PoC demonstrating the integration of invoices generated in CureMint with the customer’s Microsoft Dynamics database
  • Another PoC demonstrating the ability to allocate different budgets for individual practices/clinics under a DSO
  • An integrated buying experience with the ability to seamlessly browse for products on a supplier’s website and checkout via CureMint

Creating Customer-Specific Microsites

• One of the major requirements for CureMint was the ability to offer a personalized solution to each of their customer DSOs. This included separate inventory, from a pre-approved set of suppliers, visible to each customer. And variable prices visible to each customer, based on their individual contract with their suppliers.
• We leveraged Pantheon Upstreams to build their microsites to specification. This enabled the team to use the same Drupal codebase for each microsite, meaning each site is standardized with the core CureMint eCommerce portal. Each microsite now simply had a different database to cater to changing specifications.

Automated Workflow for Microsites

• We built three microsites over the course of the engagement. But they also created a solution to help CureMint teams create and launch new microsites independently, as and when required.
• The team used QuickSilver, in addition to Pantheon Upstreams, to create automated workflows for publishing new microsites. Previously, launching microsites were done via the command line interface and required a developer. With the automated workflows, CureMint now has a visual, point-and-click interface to launch new sites. It can be used by anyone, and hence new microsites are not dependent on the availability of a developer.

The Engagement

• The project was a 3-month engagement, broken into 2-week sprints. Our 5-person team worked on approximately 50 story points per sprint and kept 15 story points as a stretch goal per sprint.
• During the course of the project, we consistently delivered on sprint goals, plus some stretch goals. The team was working in an agile manner, with enough time to change course midway, as client requirements evolved.