Profile

Sloan Express is a family-owned business with deep roots in the agricultural industry that have been serving the needs of farmers worldwide for over 80 years. Located in Central Illinois, Sloan Express is the area leader offering new agricultural parts that are equal to or better than the original equipment part. They sell directly to farmers, implement dealers and repair shops.

Sloan Express has been able to address some of the problems that today’s farmers face: parts not stocked locally; shortage of local sources for parts; and most important – TIME. The Sloan Express Customer prompt and direct delivery with no time wasted trying to find a part and then waiting for it to come in.

Challenge and Solution

Recognizing the need to take the business to the next level, Jeff Sloan and the team from Sloan Express approached us looking for Magento professionals that can migrate their existing store from 1.7. Open Source edition to Magento 2.

Magento 2 introduces new methodologies and technologies for delivering enhanced shopping and store experience to the merchants and users. But to be honest, migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is not an easy and trouble-free process. Since it’s not automated, there is plenty of manual work that needs to be done by professionals who understand migration process and your business in order to get a stable and fully functional store.

Sloan Express knew what they wanted for their future. They required a solution that can easily scale up if required and has a modular architecture to ensure faster page load time, faster add-to-cart server response time and faster end-to-end checkout time.

Magento 2 Open source (previously known as Community Edition) comes with support for only MySQL search engine, but some projects require better or more adjustable search engine in order to increase sales or conversion rate. For Sloan Express, we’ve implemented SOLR search engine in order to achieve blazing-fast search results that are also highly reliable and fault tolerant. With a near real-time indexing, advanced full-text search capabilities and optimisation for high volume traffic, SOLR has brought a new dimension for the customers using the site.

The client wanted to keep all of their existing features and extensions from Magento 1. As one can imagine, Magento 1 extensions are not compatible with Magento 2, so we implemented new ones and set fundamentals for all future technical implementations and integrations as PIM, ERP and other complex technical systems.

Since Sloan Express had a large number of categories, we had to do a major restructuring of the store’s hierarchy, which, among other, resulted with structured navigation and flow that seems more natural to the end user.