Carlstar’s strategic rebuild for performance, agility, and growth
The client
Carlstar Group is an industry-leading distributor of specialty tires and wheels for agricultural, industrial, lawn & garden, powersports, and high-speed trailer markets, worldwide. With over 3,500 employess across seven countries, the company's roots and legacy in the tire business span over a century!
Known for their innovative and customer-centric culture, Carlstar blazed an e-commerce trail in their industry, to provide a robust and value-driven supply chain for their network of reknown B2B brands, such as Carlisle, ITP, Marathon, Cragar, Black Rock, and Unique.
Carlstar partnered with Magecom to migrate their operations from M1 to M2, to improve technical performance, and to improve their B2B users' overall experience. The project focused on overcoming technical limitations by ensuring seamless integration with their ERP, and by introducing the Hyvä performance-optimized theme to yield a scalable and efficient, future-ready platform.
B2B
Tires & wheels
North America & Europe
Business challenges & solutions
Platform migration & ERP integration
UX & performance optimization
Deployment workflow implementation
Platform migration & ERP integration
The challenge
At the root of Carlstar's challenges was its legacy Magento 1 (M1) platform, which was outdated and suffering from performance bottlenecks. Increasingly, customers were unwilling or unable to utilize the online portal for purchasing. Magento 1 had reached its end-of-life, making its continued use unsustainable, due to security risks, lack of support, and increased incompatibility with modern systems.
Additionally, Carlstar’s ERP was also aging and utilzed older protocols like TLS 1.0/1.1 and SOAP API calls that would add complexity to their integration efforts. And the system relied on an inefficient customer group structure that caused significant performance and scalability issues.
Since operational success requires accurate, up-to-the-minute data synchronization to fulfill their brand-promise to customers, these challenges presented an opportunity for Carlstar to reassess their platform strategy, in light of their evolving business needs.
Our solution
Magecom blueprinted the migration path to preserve existing business logic and custom workflows to ensure data integrity and business continuity. In the process, we realized that Carlstar–like many online merchants–was using only a portion of Adobe Commerce’s full capabilties.
With just a handful out-of-the-box modules, Magecom helpd Carlstar migrate their e-commerce operations to Magento Open Source to eliminate an expensive subscription, and to measurably reduce their total cost of ownership.
On the ERP side, Magecom restructured Customer accounts in Magento, optimizing the total number from several thousand, to a number best managed by both Magento and Carlstar’s ERP. We leveraged our considerable experience building and optimizing custom API’s to ensure integration efforts would be compatible with Carlstar’s extensive library of SOAP API’s.
We treated the project not simply as a platform upgrade, but as a transformative initiative, and were able to engineer a resilient, end-to-end integration that ensured real-time pricing and inventory, and reducing manual support.
“Magecom didn’t just upgrade our platform; they reinvented our digital foundation, giving us full control to innovate on our terms.” says Micheal Brockway, E-Commerce Manager for Carlstar. It was more than a technical migration—it was a strategic win.”
“Magecom didn’t just upgrade our platform; they reinvented our digital foundation.”
UX & performance optimization
The challenge
At the heart of Carlstar’s business and technical challenges was the burning need to fullill on their brand-promise. They measure their own success by the success of their customers.
The degradation over time of their user experience meant that a large percentage of customers were bypassing the B2B portal, altogether, to place orders manually.In their legacy M1 setup, Carlstar’s site speed and performance had long been a pain point. Lagging server responses, slow page loads, and prolonged order processing speeds resulted in abandoned orders and frustrated customers.
While the migration M1 to M2 would stablize and modernize their site, Carlstar still needed to address speed and performance in order to increase adoption and satisfaction among their customer base.
Our solution
Magecom’s UX optimization efforts aimed to preserve essential business logic while incorporating modern UX principles to create an intuitive, streamlined experience that aligned with customer expectations and operational requirements.
We rebuilt and improved Carlstar’s checkout flow in M2, and then further optimized user experience by implementing Redis for caching, and OpenSearch for product discovery and findability.
Finally, we implemented the Hyvä theme for its performance benefits and development efficiency. Responsive design, fast page loads, and clean and intuitive design meant Hyvä would meet and exeeded Carlstar’s strategic requirments. And by leveraging default features while minimizing customizations, the impact was immediate and lasting, both for customers and developers.
“We can take what Magecom created
for us and expand on it across the business.”
Deployment workflow optimization
The challenge
Carlstar’s development lifecycle was characterized by legacy, manual processes for code staging and deployment. This approach introduced risk, slowed release cycles, and complicated coordination between development, QA, and production teams.
"We had old-school ways of doing things—legacy systems and manual deployments that slowed us down,” says Brockway.
In an environment where agility is critical, these bottlenecks impeded the company’s ability to innovate quickly and reliably. They needed an upgrade to enhance development velocity and stability.
Our solution
Magecom implemented a state-of-the-art CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment) pipeline that incorporated version control, automated testing, and staged deployments.
This system enabled automated, repeatable, and error-resistant builds and releases that dramatically improved deployment speed and reliability, and empowered Carlstar’s internal teams with greater control and confidence, accelerating innovation cycles while reducing operational risk.
“The bucket pipelines and automated deployments fundamentally changed things for the better. Now, we have staging and production pushes based on approvals, which is phenomenal. It’s a real game-changer for how we develop and operate,” says Brockway. “We can take what Magecom created for us and expand on it across the business.”
Magecom helped Carlstar overcome
technical debt and overhaul B2B operations.
About us
How we own it
We love crafting success stories, one business at a time.
Success can mean many things. Yet, one of our favorite definitions is the peace-of-mind that comes from working with a true partner agency. With people who speak the same language to simplify the complex, and who always deliver on their promises. Our clients benefit from the highest-value e-commerce consulting and technical talent available anywhere in the market.
12 years in e-commerce
Organizational maturity is driven by processes.
Smart companies select a partner agency that demonstrates strong operational processes, along with the expertise to adapt them for specIfic client needs. We've enabled successful online sales operations across a range of industries and verticals, with clients leveraging our broad experience and deep knowledge base to enhance their market position and become trendsetters within their niche.
Engineering the future
We believe technology should serve people, and not the other way around.
The right technology can elevate your business to new heights. But you need an efficient and highly-effective technical partner to make it work. Our e-commerce experience runs broad and deep. From marketing automation to conversion optimization, and from business workflows to back-office system integrations, the solutions we deliver help you grow revenue and marketshare while reducing your total cost of ownership.
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