Sector(s)
Project Team
Avatar New York worked with MTH Electric Trains to design, migrate, and develop the website. MTH supplied product expertise and business requirements for catalog discovery, purchasing, preorders, dealer access, and technical support.
MTH Electric Trains manufactures model trains and accessories for collectors and operators. Its website serves customers researching products, dealers helping buyers find available models, and owners seeking manuals, parts information, and technical support.
MTH partnered with Avatar New York to modernize its legacy Drupal website. The rebuild combined a responsive product experience with online purchasing and specialized workflows, while preserving historical catalog information and support materials.
About the project
The challenge
The legacy website was slow and difficult to navigate. Modernization required more than a new design: MTH needed to organize a specialized catalog, introduce direct online sales, support its dealer network, and preserve years of product documentation.
An important requirement was distinguishing products available for immediate purchase from upcoming releases that customers wanted to reserve.
The solution
The rebuild connected structured product content with commerce and customer support:
- Search and filters help visitors narrow the catalog by attributes such as scale, railroad name, product type, and product line.
- Product records bring together imagery, specifications, features, manuals, parts documents, and sound-system resources.
- Online purchasing connects payment processing, shipping calculations, stock controls, and fulfillment.
- A custom preorder workflow lets customers reserve eligible upcoming products separately from ordinary shopping-cart orders.
- Staff can review pending preorders and select quantities for processing when products become available.
- Customers can find nearby dealers and authorized service centers by postal code and distance.
- Dealer inventory tools let participating dealers maintain product availability listings linked to catalog records.
Preserving product history
Custom migration tools transferred legacy product records, catalogs, news, classifications, images, and technical documents. Redirect mappings for product and news content helped maintain continuity with existing URLs.
The resulting website supports both current sales and the continuing value of older products. Drupal gives MTH a platform that can accommodate specialized business workflows while keeping product content and customer resources connected.
Outcome
MTH now has a unified platform supporting product research, online purchasing, upcoming releases, dealer discovery, and technical support. Customers can move from exploring a model to finding purchase options and accessing ownership resources within the same website.
The project received a Season 17 Web Excellence Award in the Website, Consumer Goods category.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal’s structured content and taxonomy suited a catalog organized by scale, railroad name, product type, and product line. Its content relationships allowed detailed product records to remain connected to images and technical resources.
Drupal Commerce provided the foundation for purchasing, payments, shipping, and stock management. Drupal’s extensibility also supported a separate preorder workflow and dealer inventory tools tailored to MTH’s business.
Continuing with Drupal provided a migration path from the existing website, allowing MTH to preserve valuable product history while expanding what the platform could do.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Drupal Commerce supplies the purchasing foundation, with contributed integrations for payments, shipping rates, fulfillment, and stock management.
Search API and Search API Solr support catalog discovery. Search API Location, Geofield, and Geocoder support location-based dealer searches. Paragraphs gives editors reusable components for public-facing content.
Migrate Plus and Migrate Tools supported the legacy migration alongside custom source plugins for MTH’s product records and related documents.
A custom Tailwind CSS theme provides responsive presentation. Custom Drupal modules connect catalog content to purchasable products, manage dealer inventory listings, and implement the preorder workflow with separate review and processing controls.
