About the Project

Similar to the USC Band eCommerce project, the El Rodeo project was prompted by the need to transition off of a custom 3rd party developed shopping cart application that was no longer PCI compliant by USC standards. Furthermore, the owners required the assistance of Provost IT developers to add or make changes to their products. The other problem was that the informational content of the website was built using static HTML, so the owners also needed the assistance of Provost IT developers to make changes or updates to the content.

The solution, similar to the USC Band eCommerce project, was to use WordPress and WooCommerce on the PCI compliant server managed by the Provost IT Systems & Infrastructure Team. However, unlike the Band project, El Rodeo’s eCommerce solution needed to be fully integrated with the informational portion of its website.

Reasons for integration include:

• It didn’t make sense to create a separate website for a little bit of informational content.
• The informational content supported the primary purpose of the website, which is to sell yearbooks.
• Convenience for the content and store managers as there would only be one website to log into.

Plugins Used

These are the plugins used to make the site look and function the way it does and excludes any admin plugins such as User Role Editor or CMS Tree View.

Before

After

Method

To accommodate the lightweight content of the original site and speed of the project, the Essence Pro theme on the Genesis Framework was selected. The theme’s authors indicate that the theme is designed for simplicity and is pre-sstyled for WooCommerce.

Additional research was conducted into other into other yearbook websites and publication style commerce websites.

A major challenge was transforming the previous concept of a single page order form into a dynamic website akin to modern online. This was difficult because images from previous yearbooks were not available, nor were there specific descriptions about previous yearbooks. The only thing known was the year and title of the yearbook.

As part of setting up the yearbook product, we needed to include a method to pre-order the yearbook. The normal workflow of Student Publications is to use the pre-orders to pay for the run of the book.

An additional challenge was including non-physical products as part of the store’s inventory. Each year the yearbook sells dedication pages in various sizes to be included within the yearbook. To solve that, we broke out each size into its own product and used Gravity Forms to collect information regarding the dedication.

As part of the shopping cart architecture and user flow, we utilized WooCommerce’s capabilities to cross-promote or upsell products. If someone was interested in ordering a yearbook, they might also be interested in creating a dedication.

By far, the greatest challenge to the project was transitioning the old website from a Paypal payment gateway to an Elavon payment gateway. This was required to comply with Provost Finance’s accounting and reconciliation workflow, as well as complying with USC Treasury’s PCI standards.

Project Risks

The project encountered three key risks that caused major delays in the project. It took 17 months to complete when it could have been done in 6-8 months.

Risk – Content Delay

While the design and build of the site went relatively quickly, the project required significant attention from the client’s side. Images and text were not delivered in a timely fashion, which caused the project to be delayed 9 months.

Risk – Financial Components

The previous eCommerce platform utilized a PayPal gateway, which was a nonstandard solution compared to the USC preferred methods. The use of PayPal also caused some delay in the financial reporting and reconciliation side of things. It was important to align the new website with the standards set by USC Treasury and Provost Finance.

Because of the bureaucracy needed to change from PayPal to Elavon, the project was at risk of being delayed.

Risk – Launch Delay

Because of the delays in content delivery, the expectation and assumption that the site could be launched immediately after the content population phase was completed were unrealistic. Once the content had been delivered, it was important to initiate the final phase of the project which included quality assurance, troubleshooting, tweaks, and testing of the payment gateway.

Additional screenshots