Case study · Health & wellbeing
MHFA trains people to recognise, connect and respond when someone is experiencing a mental health issue. Demand for the training was growing, and the online shop that sells course placements, instructor materials and merchandise needed to keep up.
The challenge
Purchasing sat at the centre of MHFA’s operation. Course placements, instructor course materials and general merchandise were all bought through the shop, and as demand for the training grew the process needed to become much easier for everyone using it.
Improvements were urgent. Every extra step between someone deciding to train and completing the order was a barrier to getting more people trained, and the shop had to be simpler for everyone who used it.
The shop also had to serve very different people. Instructors, Relationship Managers, MHFA internal users and the general public each needed their own pricing, product permissions and GST status, so a custom multi-user solution was required rather than a standard storefront.
Alongside managing those permissions, the shop had to apply GST correctly and offer different shipping options. A complete upgrade was the priority, and the purchasing process had to become efficient and user friendly for every group at once.
Approach
We chose to keep the shop on WooCommerce and extend it with a co-ordinated set of integrations, so that accounting, shipping, search, security and Salesforce each connected to the one storefront rather than living in separate systems.
The multi-user solution sat at the centre. Pricing, product permissions and GST status would follow the user, whether they were an instructor, a relationship manager, an internal user or a member of the public, and payment methods would be offered according to the user group. Every part of the shop had to be testable from the front end, so administrators could see it exactly as each type of user sees it.
The shift
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The work
A better user experience meant a more efficient process for people and organisations to purchase course placements, relevant materials and resources, and merchandise. With the different integrations co-ordinated, the barriers to making different kinds of orders, booking and paying through the MHFA Shop were removed.
The integrations behind the shop are Xeroom for the Xero integration and OAuth, ELEX for shipping, Gravity Forms, Relevanssi for search, Rublon for multi-factor authentication and a custom API integration with Salesforce.
Switch To lets an administrator view the website as another user role, to test functions that are visible only to certain users. Payment methods are offered according to the user group, and WooCommerce generates an invoice for each transaction and provides it to the customer on payment.
Product bundles let the admin team group products so users can buy them together in a single order. Coupons let instructors share materials with their students without the students needing to purchase them, and vouchers are sold as a standard product, with the admin team setting the discount type, voucher amount, expiry date, allowable emails, user restrictions and whether free shipping applies.
The multi-user solution manages different pricing, product permissions and GST status for a range of Instructors, Relationship Managers, MHFA internal users and the general public. Each person logs in and sees the version of the shop that applies to them.
The Salesforce integration is a custom made API that pushes order information to Salesforce once an order is placed and paid, which triggers custom rules in Salesforce to create records such as opportunities.
A customised Xeroom plugin provides a two way integration with Xero. Orders, including payments, sync to Xero automatically when a customer completes checkout and the order is updated in WooCommerce, and order information flows back into WooCommerce when it changes in Xero, so the two systems stay in step.
Rublon adds multi-factor authentication, ELEX handles the different shipping options, Relevanssi powers search across the catalogue and Gravity Forms handles the forms. Together the plugins and the custom work give MHFA a shop that serves instructors, internal teams and the public from one place, with the accounting and Salesforce records taken care of automatically.
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