Old California has been selling online on a home-baked eCommerce platform for years. The custom site provided the flexibility needed for their hundreds of highly customizable products. But, it was difficult to add a new product, update an image in the project gallery, or even change a word on the homepage! Ultimately the platform limited their growth online.

Enter Netalico and BigCommerce! Old California sought an agency partner to help with the UX design & strategy, as well as the development that a platform migration on this scale would entail. The BigCommerce platform allows the Old California internal team to make edits themselves with easier to manage processes, while allowing customers to choose from as many as 50+ different options on their products.

The biggest challenge of this project was the high levels of customizability of the products. Some options dramatically impact the price and the business did not have images for all the exact combinations.

We explored the best practices around customizations to design wireframes to lay-out each option available on their products. Our overall goal of the UX Design was to to help users best envision their customized product. The mock-ups worked with the imagery limitations, included a modal to show large samples of each material, and swatches of selections shown below the main image.

Each product is spec-heavy, with varying measurements, electronic requirements, and more depending on the options a user selects. With this in mind, we designed a few ways to see a product's specifications with the overall goal of reducing returns on these customized products, which are difficult for Old California to resell.

By using custom metafields and variant and modifier groups, our comprehensive plan for product data allowed the Old California internal team to start manually migrating products as early in the project as possible. We trained the Old California team to add the content through meetings directly with our head developer.