Galvins trade purchasing platform

The Transformation

Galvins Plumbing Supplies is a WA based, family-owned, business that has been operating for over 90 years. With 24 branches located throughout Western Australia and Northern Territory, and a team of over 160 staff, Galvins has long been recognised for its industry-leading customer service. Galvins also recently acquired Melbourne based family-owned plumbing company, Harris Trade Plumbing Supplies, adding another 7 branches to it’s network.

Galvins built its reputation on providing a personalised, honest and reliable service to their customers. However, as younger generations of tradespeople increasingly seek faster, more immediate ways to purchase supplies, it became apparent their existing technical stack was holding them back from delivering excellent service online. This digital transformation represents a natural extension of Galvins’ commitment to excellence in customer experience.

By embracing a scalable modern digital stack, Galvins can lead the way in delivering a seamless and efficient service that meets the evolving needs of its customers.

Our Partnership

Galvins partnered with both Hatchd and Adapptor to co-design and build a scalable, user-friendly e-commerce ecosystem. One unified platform was the goal, a thoughtfully designed architecture sharing a single backend provided consistency across all user interactions. The goal was to create a platform that delivered a superior customer experience while future-proofing Galvins’ ability to evolve their offering. We were able to achieve this through open collaboration and communication throughout the planning, design and build.

Co-design from day 1

Being a family run business, we instantly aligned with Galvins in our values and approach. From the first session, we have been collaborative, open and honest with the Galvins team and they have done the same with us. This established a solid base in our relationship, which was critical as we embarked on a complex technical build. We gathered requirements through our co-design sessions with the Galvins team - from senior executive members, digital specialists, the sales team, and accounts team.

We became regulars at Galvins Osborne Park. We were on the ground gaining insights from customers directly - tradespeople and plumbers - to validate concepts and ideas. One on one sessions yielded vital insights to help refine concepts and prototypes and also build out a backlog of future features for their digital roadmap.

Through our close collaboration, a strong theme emerged: make it easy for customers to self-serve online, while retaining Galvins' warm and customer first disposition for all digital touch points. This served as our decision making anchor as we worked to create and refine detailed user journeys, wireframes, and designs, with frequent co-design sessions with the Galvins team.

Modern technologies for a modern solution

We needed to build a web front end that was modern, performant and scalable. Next.js was the perfect fit, as the framework is adaptable to multiple hosting and deployment strategies. With its roots in React, we were able to leverage a whole ecosystem of supporting libraries and tools, improving not only our productivity but also ensuring we were making use of libraries that are battle-tested in production environments.

We took advantage of the Next.js hybrid approach to rendering content, leaning into Server-side rendering and React server components for publicly indexed content such as product and search pages. We embraced client-side rendering for admin screens and dashboards.

Integration with the custom Go API that the Hatchd and Adapptor teams collectively worked on was a breeze due to the use of Open API specification and code generation to a TypeScript SDK. This drastically reduced the margin for error and refactoring effort when making changes to the API, as was often the case in early stages of development.

Of course, no front end tech implementation would be complete without content management from our friends at Sanity. We leveraged their flexible content lake to deliver the majority of the non-ecommerce website content, and have made inroads to augmenting our custom back end with product and category collections that the Galvins team can manage. The content can easily be distributed across a range of platforms, while maintaining a single source of truth. This proved to be a massive upgrade in terms of content authoring usability compared to their previous CMS implementation. Sanity offers a Content Operating System - create, edit, approval of all your content needs in one place, distributed wherever an API integration is available!

Modular, extendable back end services

The backend of the platform was built using Go, which helped optimise performance and reduce deployment times. The team selected Go for its ability to handle large-scale API services, ensuring fast data synchronisation and robust performance. The backend also needed to integrate with Epicor, Galvins’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, ensuring smooth data flows across inventory, orders, and customer management systems. We recognised early on the Epicor sync was a critical part of the system and engineered a custom Epicor integration. We worked closely with the Galvins team to optimise the internal Epicor functions and ensure timely and reliable data integrity. Some data syncs that occurred between Epicor and the client-facing web app in the old tech would take over 30 hours. With our tech implementation we were able optimise this to be approx 20 mins. That’s a 98.88% improvement.

The infrastructure for Galvins' new platform was built to be scalable, leveraging Amazon AWS and Terraform. This meant that the platform could independently scale to meet traffic demands while minimising costs. By leveraging infrastructure-as-code, the team ensured that changes could be easily peer-reviewed and applied across different environments. AWS IAM Identity Center was used to manage access, providing fine-grained control over developer permissions through single sign-on (SSO) and short-lived credentials, enhancing security and access management.

Observability is provided through Adapptor’s Command product, which enables monitoring of system health by using health check endpoints to report on the status of services and their dependencies. It also offers visibility into the sync jobs that have been executed, allowing users to easily view and manage sync tasks, including queuing new jobs through a user-friendly interface.

A pain point of the existing website was that Galvins staff were required to manually add every new user login. The new platform integrated Firebase Authentication, providing a solid and secure base for end user accounts. The team incorporated invite, sign up and login flows and implemented a comprehensive role based permission system for managing access to accounts, quotes, purchasing and administration. This allowed Galvins trade account customers to self-manage their own organisation users and significantly reduced admin for Galvins staff.

Engaging with providers to get the best solution

A key focus of the rebuild was understanding and implementing the Punchout requirements which creates a connection into enterprise eProcurement systems. Punchout simplified the process for the procurement team by allowing the website to operate in Punchout mode. When a corporate customer lands on the website pre-authenticated and shops for products as usual, they then use Punchout back to their procurement software, with the products and pricing they selected in their cart.

The Galvins business relies on this method of purchasing for large corporate buying across the mining sector. By partnering with Greenwing Technology, an experienced Punchout provider, the team simplified the integration process. Our backend custom build seamlessly integrated with a single API, streamlining the implementation and reducing complexity. Greenwing offered a plethora of additional features, allowing Galvins to be able to extend and expand their Punchout Catalog offering to enterprise buyers into the future.

When considering payment gateway options for Galvins, our focus was on a secure payment process, with no settlement delays and the ability to support multiple payment options. After considering a range of services and vendors, we selected PowerBoard created by CBA. Powered by one of Australia’s largest financial institutions, PowerBoard allowed us to deliver payment choice to Galvins' customers, with bank grade security.

Improved search and filtering

A major focus of the rebuild was improving the search functionality, which was crucial for helping tradespeople to find products quickly and easily. Galvins’ old system had basic search capabilities but lacked the modern filtering and faceting features that customers needed. After conducting thorough research, Hatchd and Adapptor chose the Typesense search framework. Typesense is a powerful, high-performance search tool that supports semantic and vector-based search, offering instant results and complex filtering across multiple fields. This decision ensured that Galvins' search experience would rival leading e-Commerce platforms like Bunnings and IKEA, with faster results and advanced search capabilities.

Testing and quality assurance

Throughout the development process, Hatchd and Adapptor’s dedicated test team conducted rigorous testing to ensure the platform's functionality, performance, and reliability. This included feature testing to validate new functionality, regression testing to ensure that existing features continued to work as expected, and smoke testing to identify any critical issues before releases. Frequent showcases allowed the Galvins team to stay aligned with the team’s progress, ensuring that the platform met both technical and user experience requirements. The teams also implemented robust monitoring tools, allowing for real-time tracking of system health and performance.

DevOps was leveraged allowing the team to have automatic linting and testing of the application as changes were made. Unit tests were developed along side features which allowed the team to validate functionality even before the code reached a deployed environment. DevOps was also used to allow automated deployments, allowing the team to quickly deploy changes in a robust way.

Future releases and ongoing support

With the new platform now in place, Galvins has a scalable, flexible system that can support future growth and continuous improvements. The platform’s modular design allows for the addition of new features and integrations, such as further enhancements to the search functionality, integration with new third-party services. A robust roadmap for the platform is in place and more will be released in early 2025 - watch this space! The Hatchd, Adapptor and Galvins partnership is strong, and we look forward to continuing to provide exceptional service to Galvins' customers through the online platform into the future.