DECOUPLED COMMERCE
How TELUS Mobility moved to a new website & kept its checkout
TELUS’s checkout tied each phone order to credit checks, payments, fraud screening and SAP shipping. In 2017, TELUS moved to a new website, and Acro added a cart service that handed its shoppers to the same Drupal checkout.
Project highlights
Changing your website can mean rebuilding the checkout connections your business depends on.
Checkout is where the hard rules live: credit checks, pricing, payments, fraud screening and the hand-off to your ERP. A decoupled store keeps it apart from the pages. One system shows the pages. Another runs the cart and checkout. That split is worth a look when:
- Marketing changes pages and offers far more often than checkout rules change.
- Checkout talks to credit, account, shipping or ERP systems you already run.
- Launch days put extra pressure on checkout, credit checks and order handling.
TELUS Mobility faced that decision in 2017, when it moved to a new website. Acro had built its Drupal store in 2015. Acro connected the new website to that checkout and maintained the store until it shut down in 2021.
Background
TELUS Mobility is the wireless arm of TELUS, one of Canada’s largest telecom companies. Its online store sold phones, tablets and accessories to new and existing customers, in English and French.
For TELUS, the sale didn’t end at the cart. One order could be a new customer, a renewal or an added line. Checkout had to check the customer’s account and credit, apply the right offer, price it for their province and screen it for fraud. Then the order went to SAP to ship.
Acro’s StoreBox code for TELUS dates to at least 2007. StoreBox was Acro’s own store software. It included storefronts for TELUS employees and for a partner, ACN. There was a pre-order site by 2012.
TELUS wanted to change offers and pages without losing control of the systems behind checkout. In 2015, Acro built TELUS a new store on Drupal Commerce, open-source software anyone can run and change. Acro wired its checkout into TELUS’s own systems.
Objective
Change the store fast, without breaking what sat behind it
Shoppers needed:
- Phones, offers, billing and account details joined up in one path.
TELUS needed to:
- Change offers and pages quickly as the market moved.
- Grow its market share.
The store had to work for accounting, marketing, logistics, IT and senior leaders.
The store also needed:
- A secure, flexible store it could control.
- Software it wasn’t locked into.
- Control over its data, to meet strict regulatory rules.
- A store that worked with the systems TELUS had built itself.
- Room to handle launch-day crowds.
- A build in phases.
- A move to the new store with no downtime for customers.
Solution
Keep checkout where it was. Give the new website a way in.
Acro built the Drupal store in 2015 and wired its checkout into TELUS’s systems. In 2017, TELUS moved to a new website built in Node.js and React. Acro added a cart service to the Drupal store. TELUS’s pages called it, and it handed shoppers to the same checkout. The Drupal store kept these systems and services:
- TELUS services: account details, credit checks and available offers.
- SAP: encrypted order files out on a schedule, shipping updates back.
- Global Payments: checkout payments.
- Signifyd and TELUS’s own fraud model: fraud screening.
- Prices and legal text by province, in English and French, plus offer and validation codes.
- Order tools: order lookup, statuses for TELUS agents, and Domo reports on orders and shipments.
- Pre-orders: shipping delays for pre-orders, added in August 2015.
- Hosting: Acro ran the store at Rackspace on two app servers, with a main and a second database and monitoring.
Outcome
From 2017 to 2021, TELUS’s new website connected to its Drupal checkout
Acro made that connection in mid-2017, to the checkout it built in 2015. The links to credit checks, SAP, payments and fraud screening stayed in the Drupal store until it shut down in May 2021. Acro’s records also show:
- August 2015: Acro added JMeter scripts to simulate launch-day traffic.
- September 12, 2015, iPhone 6S pre-order day: Acro fixed a credit-information problem the same day.
- September 15, 2015: Acro added a script to save database disk space under heavy load.
- 2020: Acro’s routine for an iPhone pre-order day included pausing scheduled background jobs.
- May 2021: shop.telus.com shut down. Acro unplugged the servers by July 2021.
Before you replace your website, map what checkout depends on
TELUS’s checkout carried six buying flows, each with employee and affiliate versions. A new website still needs every rule behind them. Map these before you choose a platform: