MindArc Hero™
The better way to do Magento
Quick To Market
Stable code
Out of the box features
Less Bugs
Director, MindArc
AWS optimised
Built-in Varnish
Built-in Redis
CS/JSS optimised
Working with fashion merchants means we have always been exposed to the biggest sales of the year. From Boxing Day sales to Vogue Online Shopping Night, our developers were constantly innovating to create new solutions to ensure up time and speed during huge peaks of traffic. When we built Hero, all we had to do was combine all those pieces of optimisation into one offering.
MATT CRAIG
Director, MindArc
Performance improvements
We have tailored the platform into the best way possible to make it easier for your site to run smoothly. This has been done through rigorous re-writing of our templates to ensure the best possible performance in handling simple things like loading stock values or other product data that once would have taken a lot of time just to retrieve and display to the customer.
Hero is best suited to our AWS server hosting packages, we have optimized these to run efficiently on Apache and Nginx, with caching layers support already handled. Varnish and Redis are both a standard for our builds (with a module to support the caching layer and a warmer to ensure your site is always running fast even if traffic is low).
The benefits of Hero
MindArc Hero is already providing stability for multiple merchants. By standardizing our build process, we have been able to regain control of version upgrades and new features. This standard ensures retention of quality and thorough testing and therefore minimal bugs. Our framework has been stress tested to ensure it is up to date with industry standards and quality, rather than just jumping from one version to the next.
Which features come out of the box?
Along with our performance enhancements, MindArc Hero contains a variety of modules and functionality which comes as part of the framework. We believe there are certain features which are essential for running a successful eCommerce site, so rather than adding those features to your project at an extra cost we’ve bundled them into the core. See below a small section of some of the benefits Hero contains:
Easy theme control
We created a whole area in the back end which allows us to change text/settings on the theme which is being used. This can easily be controlled in the admin area and also covers template layouts.
MindArc data migration module
We developed a module to migrate your data in realtime during your project so you won’t be waiting for hours during go-live for it to move across. We further customised the module to work across platforms.
OneStepCheckout
Fully tested with all the major payment gateways (Braintree, Afterpay, zipPay) and shipping modules.
Social control
Allowing your customers to easily log in using their Google Plus, Facebook or Instagram accounts.
Stock movements & notifications
These modules help you track your inventory effectively with detailed descriptions of the ins and outs of your SKUs. We also built in out of stock notifications, to capture your customers interest even when their size is unavailable. This data also helps your buying team make smarter decisions.
Ajax
This visual functionality can be applied to any area of the site such as add to wishlist, add to cart, log in or quick view.
Mega menu
A pre-tested, easy to manage mega menu.
Blog
We know how important it is for you to connect with your customers through content, so we made it easy for you to update and control regular Blog posts to your site.
Email services
We pre-test your email platform of choice ahead of time (if we haven’t already) to ensure success during your project.
Core fixes
This is our own IP, our MindArc Core, containing all the fixes for the numerous bugs we have fixed during our time working on Magento 2.
Feed generation
We know you want to see your products on as many channels as possible, so we built in feed management to our Hero. This makes it easy for you to show your products on Facebook, Google, Criteo and more.
ZenDesk
Easy customer service management and integration.
Hotjar
This is one of our favourite tools and is essential for capturing niche issues and replication steps.
Hero is the result of us hearing one too many stories from merchants with bad experiences on Magento. We want to help our merchants grow by providing innovative development to help their businesses and instead we were stuck fixing bugs on every version release. Hero’s core code will always be kept at a version we are comfortable with and core overrides are not permitted.
The bug fixes we have done address bugs raised by the community and our merchants, meaning you will share the same fixes. Hero Phase 2 will see us start to catch up to the latest Magento version with thorough testing, capturing new bug fixes into our MindArc Core Module.
JOHN VELLA
Head of Technology, MindArc
Customizing Hero
As we have handled the core platform for you, we can focus as our attention on optimising your website to suit your specific business requirements. Having a stable, Hero code base means we have more time to develop for custom processes during the build phase of the project. This means we can allow modifications to your instance with further Module development to streamline your processes.
We have also developed a structure of Administrative actions based on processes we see our merchants use on a day to day basis and make it even easier for you to manage your Magento orders and customers without having to jump to different areas of Magento, making the core platform work for you even more without having huge amounts of knowledge of every area. We have also developed the Hero Build to the standards of best practice UX.
The Hero theme can be customized however using our base theme allows you to have all features work out of the box and has been tested to ensure that it can support features on demand. We are constantly evolving the Hero theme further to support even more features.
Time to launch
Setting up a store on the Hero instance is quite fast and the build time is on average 4 months depending on customisation and branding requirements.
A typical timeline begins with Phase 0, gathering all requirements and build information including data requirements for migration. We would then move into Phase 1, which is the acceptance of the requirements and specifics. Phase 2 is our Instance Setup and Build (this also includes beginning Data Migration too). Phase 2 typically takes from 4 months and leads into Phase 3, which is our QA and Testing. At this point, your site is passed to you for UAT, final iterations and approval for deployment!
Data is migrated and made easier than ever, meaning we can port your data from your current platform while we are building. Some merchants have very custom data requirements, so our expert team will guide you through the requirement gathering for this fully to ensure all your valuable data is considered and moved over.
Price options
Our Magento 2.2.2 Hero Theme will provide the most valuable commodity to your business: time. We’ve already done the groundwork and the project process will consist of tailoring Hero to your requirements. Prices for Hero start from $80k.
Do you want to know more about Hero and how MindArc can help you automate your business? Fill out the below form, tell us a little about yourself and one of our team members will be in touch!