New WebSite

Over the course of the company we've gone through and developed multiple sites with the goal of making improvements and adding features we didn't have before. 

We started the business in 2013 by using bigcommerce. At the time bigcommerce kinda did what we wanted but not really. It didn't support all the long term features but it was cheap and got us moving in the right direction. We did a theme refresh on the same platform in 2014. During 2014 we got into a partnership via VEX Robotics and realized we had to switch to something better and that would scale. We went from 30 products to over 200+ in a year. 

In 2015 we migrated to magento 1 and have been using it till this date. We've done a few refreshes and new features. But due to the nature of magento it was very resource intensive to keep running for us. Sometimes I felt as if we spent more time on web related tasks vs creating content. Last year Adobe announced that magento 1 was EOL (End of Life), so in that regard we needed to make a decision to switch to magento 2 or something else. With the cancellation of the FRC 2020 season and Covid-19, we decided to spend extra time and started to develop a new site starting April 2020. The main focus for me personally was:

• Ease of creating content for our customers. More information and updates. 
• Ability to improve on the same platform long-term (5+ years)
• Syncing across all our apps and inventory. 
• Multi store for all our new projects & product lines (robotics and non robotics related)
• Overall, something that I'm personally stoked about. 

So...... a new site is born. We've migrated to Shopify (slowly moving to Plus) and have overall been happy. I'd love to hear feedback, both good and bad. Its always important for me to do the best job I possibly can. Its probably the reason why we've gone through so many iterations of the site. 

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ChangeLog

• Gift For Good - Ability to donate to nonprofits
• Rewards - Earn points and get free products
• Gift Cards - Ability to buy and use them on our storefront
• Quick Order - Order items fast and with a csv/excel sheet
• 4D Packing - Orders have more accurate shipping rates and cheaper rates across the board. 
• Shipping - Packages under 1lb qualify for USPS First class now. 
• Calculators - Ability to copy/paste links, updated UI and more
• Blog - More updates on what we are up to 
• Stock Status - Easy way to see all backorder items status
• Contact page - Updated with more features
• Categories - Pages updated with ability to view more products at a glance
• Pages - Updated to include more information. 
• Search - Upgraded search that will redirect to group pages
• Coupon Codes - Ability for them to stack at checkout
• Stock status icons - More clear stock status icons & wording
• Cart - Ability to download cart and reupload it back to quick order quickly.
• Login - Social Media logging in ability
• Checkout - Ability to use shop pay, amex cards and quickly check out. 
• HelpDesk - Built in Chat to the site and additional help resources.