Athos Integration Process

The following guide will explain what steps Athos Commerce takes when creating a mockup for a new or redesigned site. These steps ensure that we are able to meet and exceed our client's expectations. 

Prefer a video overview? Click here to see a walk-through of this process through our project portal. 

Kick-off Call

A member of our project management team will reach out to schedule a kick-off call with your team. In this call we will:

• Review the Athos integration process
• Determine the project stakeholders
• Discuss the required deliverables necessary to start your project
• Answer any questions you may have about the process

Note: From time to time, the kick-off call email may accidentally be hidden in a Spam folder. If you haven't heard from us within a few days of signing up with Athos, please check this folder.

Data & Design Review

Once you have the necessary data ready to start the project, a member of our Solutions team will review your data to ensure it is in a format that can be imported by Athos. If you are sending us a custom feed, please see our Data Feed Guide.

In addition to having data connection, we will need the URL to a finalized, production-ready product listing page (category/collection or search results page) on a dev/staging environment, preview theme, or live/production. Click here to learn more about what a "finalized" design means.

Requirements Gathering

Once we have received the necessary deliverables mentioned above, we will have a call to review and complete a requirements document. Items detailed in this document include:

• What designs Athos will be matching as part of the implementation process
• Required Google Analytics connection to pull historical data
• What filters you would like to have available within the integration
• What sorting options should be available within the integration
• Any badges that you wish to have displayed in results
• How you would like to handle out-of-stock products and other inventory logic
• What types of pricing logic are required for your site
• Any other functionality required for your site

Example Requirements Document

Requirements Review

Once the requirements document has been completed, a member of our solutions team will review it, making any necessary call-outs and asking related follow-up questions.

Implementation Process

Once all requirements have been approved, our implementation team will begin to work on your project. They will complete all required data setup and design work for your project. The implementation timeline varies depending on the complexity of the project, current queue, and holiday seasons. This includes:

• Integrating our Google Analytics API
• Configuring our industry-leading relevancy engine
• Creating product filtering and sorting options
• Excluding products not to be displayed within results
• Performing data massaging to ensure high-quality results
• Matching your existing search and category pages using our JavaScript catalog
• Integrating any existing JavaScript functionality into our JavaScript catalog
• Creating a new rich autocomplete search to show search suggestions, products, filters, and even merchandising as the customer types a search query
• Perform a full internal QA review to ensure that nothing was missed, including cross-browser testing and mobile testing

Once the design is complete, it will be delivered to your team for review. Depending on the commerce platform or deployment procedures, Athos may provide an initial mockup, integrate directly to a preview theme, and/or provide instructions and a change log for your development team to integrate onto your development site/theme. At this point, your marketing and web teams should review the design to ensure it meets all your requirements and then provide any revisions to the Athos team. 

Revisions

Once Athos has received a full list of revisions from your review, we will make any changes required.

Note: If any new requirements come up during revisions that weren’t covered in the initial requirements phase, there may be an additional charge to implement them.

Training

While your revisions are being worked on, a member of our Customer Success team will reach out to schedule your initial training prior to go-live.

Go-live

Once you are happy with the state of our integration, we will work with you to schedule a go-live window for your team to deploy Athos into your production website. Athos recommends scheduling go-live for Monday through Thursday during our working hours.

Support

After go-live, any issues that arise or change requests will be handled by our support team. You can open tickets with our support team here.