A training e-commerce that changed platforms without ever stopping selling

SJD Formación is the training unit of Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona, one of the leading paediatric and maternal-child centres in Europe. It offers courses, conferences, master's programmes, simulation programmes, training placements and pathways across more than 40 specialities, in person, online or blended, and in three languages, for doctors, nurses, midwives, technicians, residents, and also for families and caregivers. All of this is sold and managed from a website that, after seeing the results of our work on the hospital's corporate website, the unit wanted to completely renew.

The previous training website was built on Magento. As a store it worked, but it was rigid: developers were hard to find, any evolution became a project of its own, and content management, from courses to news and resources, had limits that the SJD Formación team ran into every day. There were many features they wanted to launch and couldn't.

And selling healthcare training isn't like selling any other product. The platform had to sell individual courses and course bundles, courses that included accommodation or dinner, hybrid training with seat control, certifications and pathways, and courses that require checking the qualification of whoever enrols. It had to handle every kind of discount and group with access to special prices. It had to invoice individuals and companies differently, and let a unit manager buy a course for their whole team. And it had to talk to Moodle, the platform where the training takes place, to enrol each student in their course.

The brief was to build that platform from scratch on Drupal Commerce, in three languages, with a purchase experience designed for each profile and a back office that let the unit manage the offering, sales and invoicing on its own. With one added condition: the switch from one platform to the other had to happen "live", without losing a single completed purchase, purchase in progress, customer or invoice.

We started with conceptualisation, in working sessions with the SJD Formación team: the information architecture, the content plan, the navigation systems and the clickable wireframes for desktop and mobile, the taxonomies and the interaction spec. The trickiest part was modelling the sales logic: what product types exist, how they're bought, who can buy them and what happens after each purchase. Designing and building the whole messaging and events system between the platform and its customers was just as demanding.

In design we carried the hospital's identity over to a training platform with a personality of its own, and documented it in a web style guide so it could keep growing consistently.

In development we built the platform on Drupal, with bespoke front and back end. Courses, bundles, editions and dates, seats, pathways, certifications and access requirements are their own product types and rules, not adaptations of a generic store. The purchase flow distinguishes between individuals and companies, each with its own invoicing, and allows purchases on behalf of other people. The Moodle integration enrols each student as soon as a purchase is confirmed and, if the course doesn't exist there yet, creates it and registers students and instructors. We completed the platform with the payment gateway, the exchange with Navision, newsletters, a search engine with filters by speciality, profile and format, technical SEO and analytics, and a back office from which the team controls courses, bundles, discounts, enrolments, invoices and refunds.

The migration was the moment of truth. We mapped all the data from Magento to the new platform, user accounts with their purchase history, products, orders and invoice requests, and we rehearsed the migration as many times as it took until every mapping came out clean, including invoice codes and numbering. In January 2025 Magento was switched off and the new platform went live with the entire history inside, including purchases that were still in progress.

And we carried on with support: since launch we've built new developments through a bank of hours, added what the team has needed along the way, and kept the platform up to date. We've done considerably more than the original proposal called for, and the work isn't over.