How we do it: ecommerce system based on Magento for Diamant

Customer expectations and objective of the project:

One of the main assumptions of the project was to reach two broad target groups of Diamant: individual customers and businesses.The targeted companies are divided into bakeries/pastry shops, hotels/restaurant and beekeepers/farmers - individual product group is addressed to each of these groups. It is also worth noting that this is Diamant's first independent Internet sales channel.

In the process of gathering and analyzing the objectives we were focused on transparent presentation of the product and optimizing their description, characteristics and, in some cases, reliable information about nutrition.

Ecommerce website is supposed to be fast, reliable and easy to use with the possibility of further development. We can say that these are the typical expectations of each shop owner - Magento platform perfectly fits those needs, so it was clear for us that we have to use it for Diamant.

Last but not least, on of the important requirement was to integrate the store with the SAP system. In this particular case the integration of Magento with SAP allows managing inventory as well as receiving and accounting orders.

Scope of work:

Mockups and specifications

The work began in January 2015 with workshops during which we have established the concept of the store, determined the most important elements in the implementation and decided how they should function. On this basis we developed specific mockups and functional specification of the system.

UX/DESIGN

After a thorough analysis of the guidelines collected during the first workshop, we prepared a detailed store mockup (25 screens in different variations). Basing on it we created proposal of modern design for the store. The site is fully responsive (RWD), so users can easily finalize a purchase on mobile devices - from the screen width 320px to the resolution of desktop (in this case the maximum width of the store is 1280px).

Front-end

Number of unique views of online stores is often much larger than in the case of services such as corporate websites. Here we have implemented more than 25 templates in Magento system while maintaining the accessibility of the page for users on variety of devices.

Back-end

As already mentioned, we have chosen Magento as a base e-commerce platform, our expiernce allowed us to get the most value out of it. In addition to a wide range of functionality offered by Magento, we implemented a number of additional modules, such as up-selling module aimed at increasing the conversions, free shipping counter visible in the shopping cart or advanced module responsible for managing the delivery methods.

Integration with SAP system

This was very demanding phase of our work due to the necessity of ongoing cooperation with the client's IT department and external company specializing in SAP implementation and support. Preparation for this integration was preceded by two additional workshops with a client's representative and the SAP implementation company. During those meetings the data sets needed and the format were established. The exchanged data is related to customer information, orders and the order processing. In the initial stage, we considered the use of ready-made integration modules such as SAP Connect. However, during our analysis we concluded that the best solution would be to create a customized solution that is extending Magento API. Thanks to the commitment of all parties we were able to successfully complete the integration and synchronization of all necessary data.

Technologies selected for implementation:

• HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript

• Magento CE 1.9.1
  
  Modules that we created:
• Special product pairing module (containers for selected indexes)
• Advanced delivery methods management module (extending the Table Rates functionality)
• Magento - SAP integration module
• 
  Ready-made modules that we used:
• Who Bought This Also Bought –module that allows recommendation during the process of purchase, showing items bought by other customers who chose the same product as we did
• SOAP API

Project timing:

January-August 2015

Number of people involved: 9 (2 project managers, 2 graphic designers, 1 front-end developer, 3 back-end developers, QA specialist 1).

Project schedule:

1. Implementation analysis, workshops, development of mockups models and specifications: January - March 2015
2. Graphic Design: March - May 2015
3. Back-end and interface implementation: May - July 2015
4. SAP integration: June - July 2015
5. Testing, contenting: July 2015
6. The official store publication: 3 August 2015

Summary

Preparing an online store that is selling specific products from the food industry has been an interesting challenge. Different target groups and their online shopping habits required putting a lot of attention to the structure of the store that was done in quite a unique way. Also a special approach was taken for delivery or payment methods, where it was necessary to apply solutions enabling easy configuration of multiple delivery methods adapted to various restrictions (such as the weight of the packages, shipping or special related products - containers). The most interesting and most challenging task was to integrate the store with SAP, where it required intensive simultaneous collaboration with the client and company responsible for implementation. The project has brought us a lot of experience and we can say that the end result is more than satisfactory.

You can visit the shop at www.sklep.diamant.pl

Do you own an online store and are considering making few changes? Contact us! If you want to read articles about our other projects, check out How we do it on our blog, where every week we describe different example of our work.