An A+ Ecommerce Upgrade for a Digital Homeschooling Business

The Pillars of Homeschool Education

Imagine Learning delivers an online K-12 curriculum for students, targeting parents who are supplementing their children’s education with homeschool materials, or adopting homeschooling as their comprehensive education choice. To empower students and educators, Imagine Learning believes in staying focused on the pillars of collaboration, personalization, innovation, equity, and student-centered growth.
 
Founded in 2004 by a group of educational and software professionals, Imagine Learning has grown exponentially over their first two decades. And as any parent or child knows, sometimes growth comes with growing pains. The company operated on a homegrown ecommerce platform that was becoming increasingly unstable and inefficient. Routine marketing updates and minor content changes required significant development effort. The ecommerce platform couldn’t communicate with Monarch, their learning management system (LMS), which meant that access to newly purchased courses required manual intervention. Subscriptions could not be automated – a particularly valuable missed opportunity for revenue and customer satisfaction.
 
In addition to the technical issues, there were user experience issues to consider. Previous iterations of their website created confusion about product offerings, particularly regarding the differences between physical and digital courses, teacher-led versus student-led options, and curriculum types. As a result, a new ecommerce platform alone wouldn’t resolve the challenges Imagine Learning faced. They needed a strategic approach that would provide parents and educators with a clear, intuitive presentation of their diverse educational offerings.
 
Imagine Learning engaged Guidance for the project, which required a combination of strategy, design, and development work. With Shopify Plus selected as the ecommerce platform, Guidance adapted a suite of applications and built a custom middleware solution to address Imagine Learning’s multiple critical pain points, which also included a pressing need for real-time integration with their LMS.

Creating the Ideal Flow

At a high level, Imagine Learning offers four different product lines. Ideally, a parent coming to the site would be able to easily understand what those product lines are, and make a confident decision about which one would be best for their family. Imagine Learning felt that the legacy site had become confusing and overwhelming, and didn’t help parents in the ways they needed.
 
To solve for this, Guidance developed a structured content strategy. In the redesign of the website, each of the four product lines is visually distinct, with dedicated landing pages and color-coded branding to help users quickly understand the different options. Moving through the purchase process, Guidance implemented a dynamic product selection tool, allowing parents to filter options based on their needs – for example, choosing between online and print materials, or between independent study and teacher-led courses. On individual product detail pages (PDPs), Guidance used custom icons, real-time availability indicators, and streamlined call-to-action buttons to direct users toward purchasing choices while reducing decision fatigue. Integrated messaging on the PDPs provided additional details about student eligibility, trial options, and subscription status.

The Modern Subscription Model

One of the most significant challenges to address was Imagine Learning’s complex subscription model. The existing ecommerce system struggled with reliability in processing recurring payments, leading to revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction. Recharge was selected as the appropriate subscription platform solution. Out of the box, neither Shopify Plus nor Recharge were ready to handle the ambitions Imagine Learning had for their new system, such as offering free trial periods, multi-tiered access, and custom pricing based on past purchases.
 
Guidance developed a custom integration between Shopify Plus and Recharge, ensuring that subscriptions can be managed at both the primary account and sub-account levels. This required deep customization of Recharge’s default theme and backend logic. The solution allows parents and educators to create sub-accounts for students and manage subscriptions per student. Guidance also implemented a workflow automation system to handle free trial eligibility checks, subscription activations, and trial expirations without manual intervention.

Keeping It COPPA Compliant

The primary account and sub-account levels within Shopify Plus serve an additional purpose, and required some inventive customization. Imagine Learning is used in many cases by children under 13 years of age. As a result, compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is essential. This presented both technical and user experience challenges for the replatforming. Parents would need to create separate accounts for each of their children, but Shopify lacked out-of-the-box support for sub-accounts. Furthermore, Recharge’s native subscription management options didn’t allow for the kind of mapping necessary to accommodate multiple child accounts.
 
To ensure regulatory compliance while maintaining a frictionless user experience, Guidance leveraged Shopify’s meta fields to build a custom sub-account system. Parents register first, then create sub-accounts for their children, creating a situation where parents provide the necessary compliance consent, and then assign courses to specific students. This happens before any student data is stored or used. The sub-account structure extended into Recharge for subscription management, and was seamlessly integrated with the learning management system for real-time course enrollment.

Syncing for Success

One of the primary customer service challenges – and opportunities – for Imagine Learning was that their homegrown ecommerce platform and their learning management system (LMS) operated independently. This caused delays and inconsistencies, as parents of students who purchased courses often faced wait times of up to 24 hours before gaining access to the material, because of the manual data synchronization processes required.
 
To resolve this situation, Guidance developed a custom middleware application hosted on AWS using Remix. This middleware served as the central hub for communication between Shopify Plus, the LMS, and other third-party services. This enhancement notably improved the user experience, eliminating delays and significantly reducing customer support inquiries related to access issues.
 
Deploying this custom middleware solution enabled real-time enrollment. During the checkout process, parents can assign courses to one or more students. As soon as the purchase is completed, the middleware triggers an API call to the LMS, granting each student access to their courses immediately.

Leave No Customers Behind

The migration off of Imagine Learning’s homegrown ecommerce platform also required that product details, subscription histories, customer accounts, and order records be compiled from multiple legacy systems. Transferring this data accurately and efficiently to Shopify Plus required extensive planning and collaboration.
 
Guidance used the Matrixify app, specially designed for data migration projects with Shopify Plus, to ensure a smooth transition without compromising historical data integrity or user experience. Multiple rounds of test migrations were conducted with Imagine Learning’s internal teams, to refine the process and minimize post-launch disruptions. Pre-migration audits and automated validation scripts served to verify data integrity before the final Shopify Plus deployment.

Mixing the Physical With the Digital

Most of Imagine Learning’s products are digital. But for some courses, they also offer physical lab kits, which require special shipping considerations. Their previous fulfillment process relied on manual coordination with third-party logistics providers, which at times resulted in errors and shipping delays, negatively impacting the customer experience.
 
As part of the migration to Shopify Plus, Guidance developed a real-time drop-shipping integration using Pacejet’s cloud-based shipping software platform. For parents placing orders that included lab kits, shipping costs and estimated delivery times were retrieved in real-time from Pacejet and displayed at checkout. Completed orders that included lab kits were automatically flagged and routed to Pacejet for fulfillment. Guidance also made use of Pacejet’s customizable shipping rules, so any special handling instructions for lab kits could be embedded when necessary.