Vickie Hawley (Sous Vide Tools) for Corefinity - Adobe Commerce Downgrade - Testimonial

Speaker: Vickie Hawley, Gastronomy Plus Ltd

Vickie Hawley: Hi. So I am Vicky and I am one of the directors at Gastronomy Plus Limited and we have a website called Sous Vide Tools, which is a trend led catering equipment website where we sell sous vide tools and other trend led products that fit into both the professional and the home kitchen for people who are real foodies and have an interest in cooking.

Vickie Hawley: So we moved to the Commerce version of Magento 2 when our Magento 1 site had come to its end of life. We didn't particularly want to move to Commerce, but we did want to keep our website. Our move to Commerce was hard. It was so hard. Um, there are so many things that we hadn't thought about, that we hadn't considered. There were so many things that went wrong. And our original plan was to move two websites over to Commerce. The first being Sous Vide Tools. The second being our sister website, Kitchen Knives. Obviously, the Commerce site has a significant cost associated with it. But as we were moving two sites over and they were all going to be hosted, included in the price and all of our other online areas that we need to taken care of, we going to be taken care of by Commerce. It really appealed to us, and we also wanted to be a little bit more in control of our own destiny. So the page builder really appealed to us as well. However, once we moved Sous Vide Tools to Commerce, we found that it wasn't the golden egg that we'd been sold and moving our other website over to the same version of Commerce. It just felt like it was gonna be an absolute nightmare. It cost us severely when we made our commerce move Our SEO tanked as we had a WordPress site that was our main blog, that generated a significant portion of our traffic and that didn't move over properly, didn't move over correctly. So we also found that there were lots of glitches with Commerce, so many glitches and nobody to help with the glitches, "This product won't save." "This category is already a copy." "A legacy issue." Legacy, legacy, legacy issue. The amount of times I've heard legacy issue. Legacy issue equals "we're going to charge you a load of money and it's still not going to work." And it just became frustrating for us. When we came to a point where we moved our Kitchen Knives website over to Magento 2, we opted to go for the downgraded version straight from the off. We moved that last October, and Corefinity helped us to move that from Magento 1 to Magento 2 We had none of the fallout that we'd had with the original move to Commerce, with our other site, and it worked. Page builder was now part of the free version, and everything that we needed, we had. So we started to look into, as we were coming to the end of our contract with Commerce, if a downgrade would be something applicable for the Sous Vide Tools website, and obviously the cost savings are phenomenal for one, and as it was, we were able to downgrade. Downgrading was an option, so we took the punt.

Vickie Hawley: How did Corefinity help us with our downgrade? How didn't. They! This space is not something that we have internal expertise on. So we were totally reliant on trusting our business to third parties. Corefinity being one, and our development agency being another. Our development agency had no experience in a downgrade. So we were totally in the team at Corefinitys hands. They hand held us. They explained what would happen and were on hand constantly. They helped us, I'm sure, significantly more than they intended to when they took the project on, and never complained. Never moaned about our naivety or lack of knowledge in the area. And, yeah, 100% a total handhold from them to get us from A to B. I in honesty still do not know how we went from A to B. But we have, and that was, in the main, due to them

Vickie Hawley: The go live from our side as a company and from the customer side appeared to be seamless. If there were people running around in the background because things weren't quite going right, we had no idea of that. And our customers certainly didn't have a lesser experience once the site was live. We didn't notice any drop off in any kind of traffic or any drop off in conversions. The team at Corfinity started on it really early, so obviously there is a little bit of down time while they went from one to the other. But once the site was up and running, it was up and running, and customers managed to place orders before we managed to even get our test transactions in. So it was absolutely seamless and we couldn't thank the team enough for how easy it went. And as I say, If there were any issues, certainly we weren't aware of them. And Corefinity just sorted them out for us.

Vickie Hawley: would I recommend Corefinity? So, Yeah, 100%. Of course I would, we had our ups and downs. It was a big project for us. and we had a lot riding on it. We had a deadline that we had to stick to. There was some nerves around whether we would get there. But they were all nerves from us. Corefinity totally had it in the bag for us and pulled it out of the bag and everything went smoothly. 100% we would recommend them. They have held our hands through the entire process. They now host our site. It's faster. There's no difference for us or our customers that we've seen as being on the open source version versus the Commerce version, apart from the savings that we've made, because now we're just paying Corefinity for the hosting. They are on it when we have a problem. They've helped us with things that aren't even within their remit. The experience that they have that they've shared with our development agency has just been second to none and anything that we're struggling with. If customers are having any issues, they always try and help us out, help us troubleshoot it. Definitely, definitely, I would recommend them. and we don't as a company recommend people as a rule, because it normally bites us on the arse, but, without hesitation, I would recommend Corefinity.