Drupal Commerce was used for the phone renewal flow of TELUS, one of the
"big three" Canadian Telecoms. It will be handling all phone orders in the
future, but our first launch is taking over the renewals which represent the
largest subset of users. TELUS uses a number of system that have to work
together and currently Drupal is only handling commerce.

*Note for people viewing the site, you will need a TELUS account to go
through the checkout flow currently, so apologies to people who just want to
demo the flow.

Custom Pricing, Taxes, Checkout, or Shipping Rules
Shipping and taxes are pretty simple for this, basic Canadian taxes and just some flat rate
shipping. For pricing rules we have to go a bit nuts since existing account,
rate plans, rate terms, add-ons all effect both checkout and monthly pricing for us.

commerce_psigate - we actually built this ourselves, but once we get
organized will get it setup on drupal.org

Technical Details
We didn't have to deal with some of the traditional problems of eCommerce
sites in this build, as we don't have a huge product catalog or complicated
tax and shipping rules. What we did have to deal with though, was very
difficult product combinations and pricing that are unique per user. We have
to pull data from internal systems to get information about you existing
account details and then match then with product information we store within
Drupal as well as product information we grab via RESTful API. We built a
very custom set of product pages, which are a lot more akin to a product
builder or wizard than a traditional product page. We feel Drupal/Drupal
Commerce is the only eCommerce platform we could have hit this level of
customization on without having to build our own system entirely or just
butcher the core framework.

Timeline
We went from nothing built to a launched and running site in 5 months, which
damn near killed us. We were able to be ready well in advance of the iPhone
launch in September though and out system performed very well. Extra thanks
to anyone who's worked on Drupal or Drupal Commerce scalability and
performance work, we made use of lots of it and even managed to kick back a
few patches, with even more coming. We were able to take 1500 orders in a day
and we hope to get up to 10 000 in the future.

Non-technical Case Study
The TELUS strategic intent is to unleash the power of the Internet to deliver
the best solutions to Canadians at home, in the workplace and on the move. In
order to do so it is imperative that the telecommunications leader goes to
market as one team, under a common brand, executing a single strategy. They
needed an ecommerce platform that was under their control and followed their
timeline, they needed Drupal.

Background
TELUS began with a completely static website they maintained on their own.
5-7 people worked tirelessly on the manually coded pages full time! Although
the system was crude, it appealed to TELUS because of the complete
flexibility it offered their marketing group, however it wasn’t a long term
solution due to the amount of man hours required to keep the site up and the
risk of human error.

When TELUS eventually made the jump to a new proprietary platform, it quickly
became evident that the platform would not suit their needs. They were being
held hostage by the provider’s upgrade path, which was rarely in line with
the TELUS marketing department’s needs. Any customization of functionality
and layout took months to even get queued for development. The flexibility
they had been promised was nearly non-existent.

Why Drupal
Drupal exceeds the boundaries of a traditional sales platform. The open
source framework allows for complete customization of the TELUS checkout flow
from both a technical and design aspect.

Ordering a phone is a software decision tree, calculating options on the fly
behind the scenes for customers to continue to move to the cart. Even with
such a complex checkout flow Drupal allows for a flexible, responsive UX
design, which made for increased usability and a better customer experience
overall.

In 2014 TELUS won the Canada Post E-Commerce Innovation Award for Best Mobile
Experience.

The biggest challenge TELUS faced was the need to integrate with internal web
services during the checkout process. A web service call is when two separate
systems communicate and share data. The flow requires a very complex and
detailed service layer and integration. Drupal’s modular architecture gives
it the ability to be integrated with systems beyond standard third party
applications including custom applications, internal web services, and
customer portals.

To purchase a phone, multiple and co-dependent service calls are needed to
provide customers with options such as rate plans, data packages and fraud
checks. With Drupal TELUS is able to coordinate all of these invisible
actions so the user can "make choices" and complete the ultimate conversion,
a purchase.

Impeccable Results
With the new Drupal build TELUS is able to process thousands of orders each
month and handle over 100 server transactions per second. The iPhone 6S
pre-order launch saw TELUS beating out all their major competitors. The
unparalleled reliability of the platform provided Telus with 15% more
pre-sales than Rogers and 21% more than Fido.

TELUS was the only site that did not crash during the iPhone 6S pre-order
(even Apple crashed at one point)!

Since making the move to Drupal TELUS is able to move at the speed of the
development community, not just at the speed of their own development team.
They can make quick moves in a typically slow moving industry and stay ahead
of their competition.

Company / Freelancer
Acro Media is a Drupal shop specializing in custom ecommerce and web
development. We work with companies that have specific problems that can’t
be solved with standard “off-the-shelf” template solutions. We provide
custom development that allows our clients to adapt at the pace of their
needs and become leaders in their market.

website: https://www.acromediainc.com/
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/acromediainc
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwGVQ8OGVK2CrpmMIrX-qBw
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/acro-media-inc
twitter: https://twitter.com/AcroMediaInc