Children’s Factory

As Children’s Factory pivoted to a direct-to-consumer model, it needed a way to sell its products online to a network of dealers across the country. Its existing dealer portal featured limited functionality and was essentially a form that connected dealers with a sales rep. It wasn’t a viable long-term option, so we set out to build something more comprehensive.

We envisioned a robust online platform where dealers could access everything Children’s Factory has to offer and the company could have more control over how its products were presented and sold.

We designed a complete e-commerce experience for Children’s Factory that combined several pieces of functionality into one streamlined system for dealers. The portal was built on a WordPress multisite that we configured with several plugins to enable features like browsing products, placing orders, tracking orders and processing payments — even for orders placed outside the system. The multisite configuration enabled Children’s Factory to present its products to the general public while also allowing dealers to place direct orders for resale.

While the e-commerce platform was getting up and running, Children’s Factory opted to deliver product and invoice data via an API that would allow other in-house applications to easily integrate with it. Because our team had such an intimate knowledge of the platform, they entrusted Paradigm to lead the API testing. It was a highly detailed process that involved a complete review of the software’s code and testing it under numerous scenarios. We also wrote several custom plugins for the e-commerce platform.

As we worked through the project, Children’s Factory became more than just Children’s Factory. The company entered an aggressive growth period, acquiring three new companies during the project. That created a particular challenge when building the product database, which now needed four companies’ product data incorporated into one system.

Our technology team successfully imported all this new data, including SKUs, product photography and resource documentation. We also added considerations in the navigation for shopping by brand, so existing customers could easily view their favorite products.