Drupal Case Study: Bella Pictures

Leveraging Drupal and Salesforce with Ecommerce

Bella Pictures is in the business of making people’s dreams come true. The San Francisco-based company has transformed the wedding photography industry through its innovative direct-to-consumer, “white label” and traditional retail Web sites. But that wasn’t always the case.

While Bella was founded by a team of professionals with backgrounds in photojournalism, e-commerce and marketing, its Web site was originally intended to generate leads for a national network of photographers, not to sell. “The main marketing site was hand-crafted php,” recalls Steve Morgan, Bella’s chief technology officer. “We’d outsourced with other partners and used a number of different applications to develop it. As a result, it was all over the map.”

Before tackling its main Web site revise, Bella decided to launch Studio Blue – a new, direct-to-consumer site that offers wedding photography for under $1,000 – in June 2009. With the desire to explore ecommerce, but lacking an open-source content management system to do it, Bella turned to Achieve Internet to create a dynamic Drupal-based site.

Solving a Unique Ecommerce Challenge with Drupal

Morgan had worked with the Achieve team in the past and was familiar with the scope and quality of the solutions that the company provides. “At the time, Achieve felt they didn’t have as much experience with ecommerce as we needed, so they put us in touch with a consulting firm in Chicago that specialized in ecommerce. But I was used to working with Achieve and really liked them. So we came back to Achieve to see if they would help us develop the Studio Blue site.”

Before the budget-friendly photo orders could begin rolling in, Bella needed to completely sync its ecommerce and sales efforts for maximum efficiency. The way the ordering process used to work was that a Bella customer would call to set up a booking and customer service would take down the customer’s information and credit card number. Then, Bella personnel would go into SalesForce and enter the relevant data. “Because the data entry was all manual, there was no way to automatically match order, payment and coupon data to SalesForce,” says Bill O’Connor, Achieve’s development manager. “That left a lot of room for error, and wasted valuable time updating orders in the system.”

The challenge for Achieve was to integrate Drupal’s ecommerce module, Ubercart, with Bella’s SalesForce data. This required the Achieve team to make several new enhancements to the both the Ubercart and SalesForce systems.

Customizing Enterprise-level Ubercart

Specifically, Achieve modified Ubercart to support multiple product attribute selections by using checkboxes on the form (the attributes natively support drop lists and radio buttons). These attributes range from the type of photo album, size or color; to the types of photos; to the number of hours to have a photographer or videographer on site. The choice of optional attributes, such as ordering additional prints, was made available in Ubercart as well.

The Studio Blue site was also amended to support multiple coupons. “The standard Ubercart module lets you use only one coupon per order,” notes O’Connor. “The code used only checks and validated the expected lone value. It had no way to work with multiple coupons. Before, Bella personnel had to keep manually adding coupons, which could result in applying too many coupons to an order. Achieve was able to override the processing to ensure that all coupons are applied correctly.”

Just as vital to the business was being able to store the customer’s wedding date with the items in his or her cart. Because the cart consists of a collection of products, there wasn’t much support to extend the object with the order-wide settings at checkout. However, since the payment plans and the products are wedding-date dependent, Achieve devised a way to store the data within the product during the cart phase of the process, and then transfer it back to the order when the order is created.

SalesForce Integration Saves Time – and Money

While the initial Studio Blue “proof of concept” site featured all the new Ubercart bells and whistles for easier ordering, it wasn’t yet fully integrated with Bella’s SalesForce system. This meant that although Studio Blue was regularly generating more orders for the company, Bella’s personnel still had to manually rectify the two systems to ensure that payment, order and wedding date information matched and was routinely updated.

According to Achieve’s O’Connor, one of the most challenging aspects of the integration was the product mapping. “The products in SalesForce have no defining SKUs and are occasionally based on other items in the cart, so the mapping logic becomes complex,” he explains. “Additionally, the attributes in Ubercart have their own definition method – each attribute could correspond with one or more product lines in SalesForce. We were able to sync the data so that all the Ubercart account transactions are now posted directly into SalesForce.”

Ubercart Automatic Payment Plans Help Bella Remain Competitive

Another development challenge concerned automatic payment plans. The system Achieve created works seamlessly with Ubercart and SalesForce to track payments on schedule, automatically send reminders and then charge the customer’s credit card for the correct amount via third-party vendor, Authorize.NET.

“As these payments are not a user-cancellable subscription, we needed to provide additional coding for Authorize.NET's Customer Information Management (CIM),” says O’Connor. “This support also required maintaining local maps of the Authorize.NET user IDs, as well as determining how to tie the user to the remote entity.”

Adds Bella’s Morgan, “Achieve has built for us a very flexible engine with distinct controls. As the economy changes, we can modify our payment terms to offer discounts for different payment plans.”

A Successful Drupal Partnership 

The success of Studio Blue’s Ubercart/SalesForce integration lead to an even larger Drupal revamp of Bella Pictures’s main Web site in early 2010. “It’s really been a great partnership working with Achieve over this past year,” says Morgan. “They have the enterprise expertise combined with the agility to quickly mold themselves to our needs. Bill is really the master of Drupal.”

According to O’Connor, it is Achieve’s philosophy of “doing it right the first time” that delivers clients cost-effective results. “With a proven development process in place that includes a project manager, dedicated developers and an architecture process, Achieve is one of the few shops in the industry that can develop all aspects of Enterprise Drupal.”

Concludes Morgan, “We want to be smart about technology, take advantage of Drupal’s contributed modules and not have to write everything ourselves. Achieve is skilled at knowing what’s available throughout the Drupal community. It would have been easy for them to recommend that we write our own ecommerce engine – and then hand us a hefty invoice. Instead, they’ve helped us by matching the best of the contributed Drupal offerings and keeping us away from what’s bad. Given the talent within the company, working with Achieve Internet is an unbelievable value.”

About Achieve: Enterprise Drupal

As the leader in the Enterprise Drupal market, Achieve Internet has built some of the most dynamic and expansive Drupal Web sites on the market today for organizations such as Disney, NBC Universal, Viacom, FastCompany and LifetimeTV. By employing a well-tested and constantly improving development methodology, Achieve Internet understands the needs of the Enterprise Drupal client.

To find out what Achieve Internet can do for your company, contact us at 858-453-5760 or rhuber@achieveinternet.com.