We recently launched a new website. It’s a bigger shift than what it looks like. The text below was first drafted by Andy, the project manager for the switch, then I added some commentary. One of our tenets to live by is Lead with Transparency. So here’s a lot of the what’s and the why’s. Read at your own risk, other than the fact that all those “new” colors you see on the site have sub 5 units, this is really, really boring.

OVERALL THEMES:

Somewhat in conflict with the above, we play to our strengths and our marketing strength is brand building, not IT, analytics, or all the detailed work involved in a website migration (maybe one day–but this was still 1000% smoother than the previous 2 migrations for all the GRTs that remember).

. This means that events and event management are fundamentally separate from other products and the “basic/straightforward” shopping cart/e-comm platform. We at GORUCK chose to combine them years ago because we care about both (no separate swag shop with BS tees and headbands and no outsourced event registration flow to active dot com or wherever) which exponentially increases complexity for both us and you. GORUCK is one brand, gear and events. Neither is an afterthought, so we have to combine them. As far as we know, we’re the only company in the world that takes this approach. If not, we’d love to see another company that does it like this. In our estimation, the brand warrants the complexity in this case.

This was not a front end update to a theme or skin, this was a 100% platform change and we did it all in house. Gained some control and agility over the brand (which we know best), lost some expertise and best practices in terms of pure IT. Life’s a trade-off, we usually error on control over the brand.

CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS & ORDER HISTORY

First off, account history is not lost–it just wasn’t exported, cleaned up and remapped to the new platform. Again, this was a full on platform change, not a redesign.

It’s a bummer and sure, it was possible with some data massaging–but worth it? Maybe, but probably not. Was it worth delaying the platform change for weeks, and having our only lead architect spend all of his time on this data massaging and migration? Doubtful. Full disclosure, it was on the to-do list, but we were already behind and upon review it was a big task so it got cut and double cut when we were already 6 weeks behind schedule. In theory we could re-import it moving forward at a later date, though that’s unlikely mostly because of the time and cost. Plus, isn’t a fresh start kind of exciting sometimes? 🙂

Last time we did a platform change we imported more bogus orders than legit and it hurt more than helped (and we had outsourced help for that one). Anyone remember that? Many people have multiple email addresses, they place orders for their friends, with different delivery addresses, the product structure in the new catalog doesn’t match the old – anything not the easy path adds complexity and complexity costs time no matter what we’re talking about in life. And time has to bring in real value.

The previous catalog was messy. We couldn’t delete anything by their design (one of those save you from yourself limitations) and we didn’t 100% know what we were doing building it out initially because as early adopters of that platform we had to figure it out as we went along–that’s not an excuse, but it is a bad combo. The new catalog is simpler and clean as of now (contains only active products moving forward with a simplified structure–product colors are combined–that type of thing) so actually backfilling old order data would have been a fair amount of extra work for no other reason than for some percentage of folks to log in and see what they bought.

While it would have been nice to show you everything you’ve ever done at GORUCK via your order history of gear and events, we weren’t sure what exactly it would have been used for. Meaning, what’s the real value? We still have access to it – our CRM app (Customer Relationship Management) is not our shopping cart (e-comm data is just one source–Event Manager is another, email is another, etc) and we currently don’t initiate returns or do much in your account section anyway.