Suma Wholefoods — Magento 2

The Challenge

Magento 1 reached end of life in June 2020, leaving Suma's existing 1.1.6 store without security patches and on an increasingly unsupported platform. The catalogue — built up over years on M1 — contained complex product data across organic, biodynamic, vegan, and specialist dietary categories, with layered navigation attributes critical to how Suma's customers browse and filter products.

The challenge was not simply installing Magento 2. It was rebuilding the entire catalogue structure, product attribute set, and customer-facing taxonomy from the ground up in M2, while preserving the browsing experience Suma's customers depended on. Then, once the catalogue was migrated, the team needed to integrate Magento 2 with Suma's ERP — building the sync logic that would keep products, stock, customers, and orders aligned between the two systems going forward.

Catalogue Migration from Magento 1

The migration began with extracting the full catalogue from the existing Magento 1.1.6 installation and rebuilding it in Magento 2.3.5. The migration covered:

• Categories and subcategories rebuilt in Magento 2's category tree to match the existing structure
• Products migrated with name, short description, full description, price, and images
• Brands recreated as a navigable attribute
• Layered navigation attributes — the full set of organic and dietary certifications that Suma's customers use to filter products: New Product, On Offer, Biodynamic, Fairly Traded, Gluten Free, Organic, No Added Sugar, and Vegan

These filtering attributes are central to the Suma customer experience. A customer looking for certified biodynamic products, or filtering by vegan and no added sugar simultaneously, needs those attributes to be correct on every SKU. Getting them right in the migration required careful mapping from the M1 data structure to M2's attribute set architecture.

ERP Integration and Data Sync

Alongside the catalogue rebuild, we migrated user accounts, order history, and CMS pages from the old platform, and established the sync logic that keeps both systems aligned on an ongoing basis.

The integration handles the bidirectional data flow between Magento and the ERP across the key operational touchpoints: product catalogue and pricing updates from the ERP appear on the website automatically; orders placed on Magento pass into the ERP for fulfilment; stock levels, customer account data, and shipping status stay consistent between both systems. Without this sync, any change to a product or price in the ERP would require a manual update on the website — at Suma's catalogue scale, that is not a maintainable operation.

Custom Theme and Front-End

Suma's custom Magento 2 theme was built from scratch. We started with the default Magento LUMA theme as a base and created a Suma child theme overriding it with Suma's brand fonts, colours, and logo. From that foundation we designed and built the custom layout templates for the three key front-end views:

Homepage. Built to surface Suma's key product categories, promotional content, and brand messaging. Suma's customers range from independent retailers browsing a large catalogue to regular account holders reordering known products — the homepage needed to serve both use cases without overwhelming either.

Category listing page. The listing template was designed around the layered navigation attribute set — the organic, vegan, biodynamic, and dietary certification filters that differentiate Suma's catalogue. Customers filtering by multiple attributes simultaneously need clear, fast results with accurate product counts per filter combination.

Product detail page. Built to present product specifications, certification badges, pricing, and add-to-cart in a way that works for both trade buyers and retail customers. The certification attributes (Organic, Biodynamic, Fairly Traded, etc.) surface visually on the product page to support purchasing decisions.

The theme build also covered CMS pages, the blog, contact and account creation flows — the full set of non-catalogue pages a working ecommerce site requires.

Payments, Shipping, and Custom Modules

Completing the platform as a working transactional store required three areas of custom development:

Stripe payment integration. We integrated Stripe as Suma's payment gateway within Magento 2 — covering card payment flows, customer account tokenisation for returning buyers, and the order confirmation and receipt flow through Magento's standard transactional email system.

Custom shipping methods. Suma's delivery operation has specific routing and scheduling requirements that Magento's out-of-the-box shipping options do not accommodate. We built custom shipping configuration to match Suma's despatch and delivery model, presenting customers with the correct options at checkout based on their account type and delivery address.

Module adaptation. Several modules from the existing Magento 1 platform had bespoke functionality that needed to be ported or rebuilt in M2-compatible form. We handled this adaptation work, ensuring the custom behaviour from the old store was preserved where it was still needed and improved where the M2 architecture allowed it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 involve?

The core work is rebuilding the catalogue structure, attribute set, and customer taxonomy from scratch in Magento 2 — not just importing data. For Suma, that meant recreating the full set of organic, biodynamic, vegan, and dietary certification attributes that their customers use to filter products, then migrating all products, accounts, and order history with those attributes correctly applied.

Can Magento 2 handle complex product filtering for organic and dietary certifications?

Yes. Magento 2's layered navigation and product attribute architecture supports multi-attribute filtering — customers can filter by Organic, Biodynamic, Fairly Traded, Vegan, Gluten Free, and other certifications simultaneously. Getting those attributes right on every SKU during migration is the critical work.

Does Magento 2 support ERP integration for wholesale operations?

Yes. We built bidirectional ERP sync for Suma covering products, stock, customers, orders, and shipping — keeping both systems aligned automatically. Without this sync, any catalogue or pricing change in the ERP would require a manual update on the website, which is not sustainable at Suma's catalogue scale.

About This Project

We specialise in Magento migrations and ecommerce for co-operatives. If your organisation needs a Magento 2 platform, read more about our ecommerce for co-operatives service or get in touch.