A Flexible Framework for Growth

OnLogic was facing a few challenges. First and foremost, their existing legacy platform was making it difficult to keep pace as their business needs—and the demands of the market—evolved. Trying to work around the limitations of the current platform was creating unnecessary effort and overhead.

OnLogic also serves a worldwide audience, which means they need to be able to manage multiple languages, multiple currencies, localization and the needs of a diverse global audience. On top of that, their actual product offering is customizable computers, meaning there’s an almost endless array of product combinations available to serve their customers. Delivering a customer journey that’s easy to navigate and purchase through is a high-complexity task all on its own.

OnLogic needed to upgrade their ecommerce platform to ensure they could manage a complex catalog in multiple consumer markets, as well as upgrade their systems with improvements to checkout, content, pricing, PDP, and more. In short, they needed a bespoke composable commerce solution that gave them the flexibility to meet the needs their monolith was struggling to keep pace with. And Orium’s experience in building custom composable solutions using MACH technologies would help them meet those needs.

The core of the replatform strategy for OnLogic was to move off of a legacy monolith platform and onto a composable commerce architecture with commercetools at the core. By leveraging moving to composable commerce, OnLogic would be able to update and upgrade their systems as needed to fit their modern commerce demands.

For example, with a fully composable platform, OnLogic would be able to replace and enhance their pricing engine with a more dynamic solution— a key tool for a company that offers highly customizable products. They would also be able to deliver a best-in-class checkout experience that could support the complexity of varying currency and tax requirements when serving an international market. A composable platform also meant they’d be able to upgrade their content delivery approach with new Contentful and Algolia implementations, giving them more elegant options for serving content and a super customized PDP. And with a host of best-of-breed solutions, OnLogic wouldn’t have to sacrifice on development or design standards while implementing their bespoke capabilities.

OnLogic is all about customer-led solutions, whether it’s empowering users to configure their own machines from parts or enabling consumers to choose their preferred payment method. Their commitment to ensuring customers get the experience they want is a key reason composable commerce made sense for them— it allows for a fully customized solution tailored to their unique needs and offerings.

The project started with a proof-of-concept (POC). This allowed Orium to assess the feasibility of different approaches to composable for tackling the challenges OnLogic was facing.

Building from the commercetools platform outwards, Orium worked with OnLogic to support their transition off of a monolith. Together, they began the process of integrating and supporting the high-priority tailored solutions for their unique business needs.

To create the customized PDP OnLogic’s built-from-the-ground-up products needed, Orium and OnLogic worked through a complex data modeling process to ensure product parts and price calculations would be accurately displayed in the UI. Because of the high degree of customizability of OnLogic’s products, this came with some unique challenges.

One particularly complicated piece of the puzzle: component parts of a system product are not meant to show up as line items in the cart, but as part of the whole system product line item. By using custom fields to make the connection between components and their parent system, Orium and OnLogic were able to hide them from the cart so only the system product with the total price of all its components would show. (Price calculation, too, required custom logic.)

Payment, tax, and shipping solutions had to be custom integrated to enable the flexibility required to serve an international clientele. Supporting credit cards, bank transfers, Bancontact, SOFORT, giropay, PayPal, the client’s own financing service, and more presented a unique challenge. Orium and OnLogic worked through complex state management, fine-tuning the checkout experience to ensure OnLogic would be able to support everything they needed: things like tracking payment methods, validating user payments while also allowing the ability to switch from one payment method to another, and ensuring the tax and shipping solutions matched the buyer’s region.

Working together, Orium and OnLogic were able to set the foundations for managing OnLogic’s complex business needs, which had long outgrown the rigidity of an all-in-one monolithic solution. The nature of a bespoke offering is that it requires a high-degree of flexibility from its solutions.

With the initial POC, Orium was able to de-risk the potential solutions for their needs and then leverage the POC for a leg-up on the actual implementation. Their new composable platform will give them greater control over the product and payment details of their experiences, and allow them to select and swap-in best-of-breed solutions as their needs continue to evolve.