A Multi-Site
Ecommerce Solution for Professional Development

Education Beyond the Campus

Caltech is world-renowned for their academic and research endeavors. More Nobel laureates are associated with Caltech than any other American college or university. The independent, privately supported institution also manages prominent laboratories and observatories in the US and abroad. Six academic divisions fulfill their mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society, while investigating the most challenging, fundamental problems in science and technology.
 
Perhaps less well known, but also widely impactful, is Caltech’s Center for Technology & Management Education (CTME). Designed for both individuals and organizations, CTME offers public courses as well as private customized programs for B2B clients. These programs may include classes already offered by Caltech; bespoke classes created specifically for a client; and classes offered by other institutions. All are designed to enhance employees’ practical knowledge and leadership development.
 
The website CTME used to offer these programs to enterprise clients had been built on older technology that had become increasingly difficult for their team to manage. Developers needed to implement increasingly frequent manual updates – not just to the website, but even to the content of the site itself. CTME’s team determined that replatforming was the best solution, to enable their staff to build new storefronts for enterprise clients, and handily manage them from a single CMS.
 
To make this possible, CMTE engaged Guidance for a two-part project. Part one was a deep collaborative discovery and design process. Requirements were documented, use cases were validated, and solutions were reviewed and approved for implementation. Part two was the deployment process, which involved replatforming to Adobe Commerce to handle product detail pages and payment for the courses offered by CTME, and Adobe Commerce’s CMS Page Builder to manage the course offerings for individuals and within an organization’s specially tailored offerings.

Selling a Custom Curriculum

The programs and certification courses Caltech’s CTME creates on behalf of its enterprise clients are developed specifically for each client’s needs. Often, Caltech has classes in its current course offerings that are suitable for these clients and their employees. In some cases, Caltech will work with a client to develop a new class or course to fill a gap in the training that a client is looking for. Additionally, a few programs necessitated the inclusion of digital courses offered through a third-party site unaffiliated with Caltech.
 
As a result, a product detail page (PDP) might consist of a single course; multiple courses from a single source; or multiple courses from multiple sources. Further complicating matters, there were cases where a program might have 10 different course options, but only five were needed to receive a certification. This required additional customization of the PDP, to present all the course options but make it clear that only a subset of those options was necessary to complete the program.
 
This is not a traditional ecommerce situation, but the flexibility of Adobe Commerce made it possible for Guidance to create highly customized product types based on the programs and what was contained in each of them. This also required new PDPs to be designed, detailing how courses were delivered (live and online or self-paced), and presenting detailed information about the courses in a way that would be easy for people to understand and absorb quickly.

Paying Your Way, Their Way

With a typical ecommerce implementation, you may offer customers a few different ways to make payments for your products, which are often physical goods. With education, you’re selling what amounts to a digital item, in the form of access to a course or a training. That’s one layer of what made the implementation of CTME’s Adobe Commerce platform so complex.
 
The next layer is the result of the clients – the companies for which CTME was designing unique storefronts. Each of them had different requirements for how they wanted their employees to pay for these courses. One thing that remained consistent was the need for module numbers assigned to the courses, which facilitated reimbursement for employees paying for their courses or having them invoiced.
 
To solve for this, Guidance developed extensive customizations for the payment options each company could use. Vouchers, installment arrangements, and billing via invoice are possible, and it’s easy for users to login, view the courses they’ve purchased, and make additional payments on any set of courses they’ve started – a function that’s not native to Adobe Commerce.

Looking the Part

Caltech’s primary website offers a fresh, uncluttered appearance to its visitors. Under the legacy content management system, the microsites created for these customized programs and enterprise clients didn’t reflect Caltech’s current branding. The work to migrate Caltech’s CTME group to Adobe Commerce CMS Page Builder also provided a perfect opportunity to deliver a visual and functional upgrade.
 
Guidance developed a responsive design for the new storefronts, with a clean presentation and improved performance for the menus and pages. Upgraded search capabilities, with improved methods for sorting and filtering, were enabled by the improvements to the program descriptions and listing pages.