Some details
WooCommerce forms the foundation for this integrated solution. We had to heavily customise Woo to work with the unique product structure, making use of grouped products and variable products to form a three-tier product structure. We custom built a Laravel-powered sync tool, pulling the existing product data for 50,000 products from SQL Server via a hosted API and pushing this data into WordPress via the WooCommerce API. It
was important to improve on the speed of the previous sync tool, and a full sync was reduced from 8-12 hours to half the time at 4-6 hours. More importantly, we are now able to do an incremental sync that only synchronises the updated product details. This means that the data can be synced multiple times a day, keeping the website up to date.The new site includes:
- Responsive Web Design and Custom WordPress theme
- Elasticsearch integration indexing all product data for better search and faster load times
- Social media integration API bridge sync tool developed on Laravel
The new site, and API sync, is proving that WooCommerce can be used for complex, non standard products, and be connected to existing product inventories for easier data handling.