Background. Delta Education. Goals. Industry Educational Publishing and Products, E-commerce

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1 Delta Education Industry Educational Publishing and Products, E-commerce Partner BizStream rd Ave Allendale MI, USA Brian McKeiver Co-Owner & Kentico MVP Background Delta Education is a leading publisher of elementary school science curriculum in the United States. They sell hands-on science kits, readers, and other learning materials to K-8 educational institutions. Over the past 3 years, education has shifted toward more inquiry-based science helping children learn scientific methods through investigation and Delta Education has nurtured this process by providing materials that can be custom built for each school system s unique objectives. Today, Delta Education s Full Option Science System (FOSS) program is a cornerstone for their core curriculum offering. FOSS is a leading inquiry-based program, available with a wide variety of supplemental programs and instructional materials serving educators and increasing student engagement with science. Goals The previous version of the Delta Education website was a relatively large, legacy e-commerce site for the Delta and Foss product lines built without the use of a CMS by a single programmer from The goal of the update was to create a website that could act as a critical piece of a larger, integrated program coordinating catalogs, sales, and online efforts for Delta Education. It needed to be a fully responsive, fresh design with both CMS and E-commerce all on one platform, capable of integrating with several other internal systems.

2 Kentico is a well-thought-out EMS; its modular design and staging capability are making it easier for us to distribute content creation and updating to a number of non-it employees. This is helping us to avoid the technical bottlenecks which plagued our old system, in which even the smallest content changes required IT intervention. Justin Harris Web Manager School Specialty - Delta Education The specific project goals included: Sales and marketing integration. Established triggers for phone and follow-ups. Complete curriculum product line support. Product family organization and set grouping, as well as downloadable content, subscriptions, and event registration. Content management. Direct, independent management of content by marketing and merchandising teams. Single site for content and product details. Curriculum solutions including a robust set of supporting materials like research papers, samples, state correlations, news, and other rich media. This data needed to be directly associated with one or more product sets and able to be managed directly by the support teams. Custom e-commerce functionality. With various third-party integrations. Better web visibility. Established through SEO best practices. Challenges One of the most substantial challenges of the project came from the complexity of Delta s product catalog and e-commerce requirements. The catalog had been represented incorrectly in the previous version of their website, which sometimes made for a clunky and potentially frustrating user experience. For instance, a product set alone is complex because of the multiple types of SKUs available for purchase, which are in turn then grouped or purchased in a variety of combinations based on the customer s specific needs. Delta desired a standard shopping cart that could process not only normal straightforward product purchases, but also provide the flexibility to handle a more mixed bag and allow for certain products to be ordered in bulk. They also wanted to provide an easy way for customers to re-order specific SKUs if needed. These capabilities required a custom checkout process that provided an individualized set of checkout steps, integration with Avalara for tax estimation services, custom shipping cost calculation business rules, and a custom payment gateway provider (Stripe).

3 BizStream has been a pleasure to work with throughout our project. From the start of their involvement, it was clear that BizStream were not only technically competent, but conscientious about getting it right and ensuring that we had a successful launch. Because BizStream was so careful about ascertaining our business needs at the start of the project and throughout the development process, this made the launch much smoother than it otherwise would have been with a less-attentive partner. Justin Harris Web Manager School Specialty - Delta Education Delta wanted a very mobile-friendly, responsive design that would allow for normal CMS, e-commerce, blogs, event registration, and featured sections of the site merged with the marketing portion of their website to have one solution for managing marketing content and product detail pages. Plus, while each of these elements needed to be included with the current rollout, the development team also had to build with the future in mind including a later phase that will integrate with Delta s ERP system. Solution BizStream implemented the project using Kentico 8.2 in order to provide Delta Education with the robust, all-in-one platform they desired to support both CMS capabilities and E-commerce. From the homepage to the back end, BizStream updated the look and feel to be crisp, clean, and easy to navigate, and created custom Kentico API scripts to import product data from Excel spreadsheets and migrate existing data from the legacy platform. Integration with all external system touch points was developed to create a seamless user experience, no matter which combination of items they placed in their shopping cart, or from their purchasing location. Results Overall Traffic: Increased 30 percent to 23,000 visitors per month Organic Traffic Stats*: More user engagement and page time increased 15 percent Website Achievements: The feedback from the sales and marketing teams at Delta Education has been very favorable deltaeducation.com was featured as Kentico s Site of the Month for September 2015

4 Yes, I would recommend Kentico EMS without reservation. Justin Harris Web Manager School Specialty - Delta Education Key criteria for using Kentico Kentico was the ideal choice for use on the Delta Education site because of its ability to handle extremely customized and complex requirements. The completed site is entirely mobile and responsive and provided a highly customized solution in the following areas: Custom E-commerce Checkout Process BizStream added more specific steps during checkout to ensure a clearer process. For instance, they added an additional page where a customer can review their order before moving on to enter their credit card or purchase order information for payment. They also performed several third-party applications/system integrations including: Stripe. A payment gateway custom from the ground up Avalara. Tax estimation custom from the ground up Custom product import scripts to move data from spreadsheets to SKUs and custom tables Custom Google Map integration BizStream added the ability for a customer to search and find a sales representative near them. This functionality is fully maintainable by the Delta content team. It also features: The ability for Delta and their associate reps to generate regions via GeoJSON, and draw the map however they want. They acquire or update the JSON from via a saved file. That determines the regions, then they simply choose where the rep should go via a region code name. This custom Google Map integration saved the Delta team from having to create very tedious and outdated HTML image maps.

5 Custom E-commerce Filters The two preliminary custom filters on the product category listings provide a special shortcut to allow users to filter lists of products by grade. Eventually, it will be honed to apply to more advanced filtering as well. Custom Product Review Module This module allows an authenticated user to write a product review, send it to a Delta customer service rep to respond or approve, then makes the review live. Instead of utilizing the message board feature, this solution includes a full Kentico 8.2 module that has its own classes and storage. The key importance is the ability to store a product review on an SKU instead of a document URL. This makes it easy to pivot the data and create a My Reviews section inside of the My Account functionality. Custom E-commerce Add to Cart Buttons This feature allows multiple items, their unit prices, and product numbers to be featured on the same product page and be seen together at a glance. It removes the guesswork, as a shopper can intuitively know which products supplement each other for a richer learning experience. Specific quantities can be chosen for any combination of items and are placed in the shopping cart with one click.

6 Custom E-commerce Cart Display Because all of Delta s core curriculum programs have the same named SKU ( Complete Kit ), BizStream updated the grouping of items on the parent category or collection so customers could tell which kit they were actually purchasing. Custom Form Controls On a product collection page, BizStream created a custom system for the management of replacement parts (SKUs) that can be drag/dropped to manage the order or use of the SKU. For example, a part s SKU exists only once, however, it can be used in multiple categories or collections, and each use has its own original quantity and sort order for the replacement center page. But if the user goes to a different collection, the sequence and original kit quantity are different. This is stored in a custom table, and whenever the form tab is submitted, a custom table is updated. Online Marketing Activity Tracking Data This main menu and shopping cart functionality works from EMS activity to track data on the site. It then communicates select information to the customer including, what s most popular, other products that may have been purchased along with the item they re currently viewing, etc. Other integrated features and capabilities of the CMS implementation Event registrations Blog Newsletter sign ups Digital downloads Custom event booking E-commerce