A broken catalog is repaired days before Black Friday

The Challenge

If the sync breaks, there is no catalog

Watra supplies church goods from Chicago, with a website whose products, images, categories and prices all come from the back office — the store has no separate catalog of its own.

That design keeps a small team from maintaining two sets of data, but it means the sync is the store: when it fails, products vanish and prices go wrong.

That is what happened in November 2024. Products, child items, images and prices had gone missing or wrong, and staff couldn't even edit the catalog in the admin — with Black Friday days away.

The Strategy

Build it right, then be there when it matters

In the original replatform, PeakBeyond insisted the connection carry everything both ways: parent and child products, images and categories out of the back office, and orders, payments, gift cards and tracking back into it.

Gift cards in particular were tested before go-live rather than after, because a religious goods retailer sells them heavily at exactly the season it can least afford a surprise.

When the catalog broke years later, the response was triage in priority order: restore what customers see first, then the data underneath, then the admin block preventing staff from working.

The Solution

A replatform built on the back office, and a rescue under deadline

Two engagements, six years apart, on the same principle.

PeakBeyond worked with Watra Church Goods's internal team and specialized technology partners to:

• Managed the replatform build, the upgrade and the redirects
• Worked with the integration partner on order import and tracking upload, and tested gift cards before go-live
• Restored missing child products and corrected price display with the integration partner
• Cleaned up categories and units of measure
• Resolved the security block that stopped staff editing the catalog

The Results

Live for the season, both times

Watra went live on the new platform in May 2019 with the back-office connection carrying products, images, categories, orders, gift cards and tracking.

After the 2024 repair, the client reported in December that the site was in good shape and running smoothly — through the weeks that matter most.

The pattern is the point: one catalog maintained in one place, and someone who answers when it breaks.

A one-catalog business kept selling through its biggest week, twice over.