01. Assignment

The client’s goal was to modernize their main sales channel for B2C customers with connectivity to multiple of their ERP systems, unifying portfolio management under one system and creating multiple end-to-end ecommerce stores with connectivity to a common data source. At the same time, the goal was to address the following issues:

• Outdated design
• The speed of the original solution
• Direct dependency of the end-end eshops on the connection to the source ERP
• Unavailability of the ERP with high traffic of the original solution, resulting from the point above
• Speed of incorporating new requirements
• Inability to incorporate some new requirements due to technological constraints

02. Solution

At the beginning of the project, a detailed analysis of the work was prepared, supplemented by the design and development of the UI kit.

The project was then divided into three milestones based on the scope into logical units in which deliverables and acceptance criteria were clearly named. Throughout the project, meetings were conducted with the client to inform them about the status of the solution and any problems that arose, along with a proposal for their solutions.

In addition to the regular meetings, after the completion of each milestone, presentations were made to the management of the company, presenting the current state of the solution and next-steps for the following periods.

After fulfilling the original scope, the project went into the agile development mode, which continues to this day and where new functionalities, payment gateways, integrations, payment methods and much more are gradually added.

Realization and technological implementation was coordinated by the project manager on the SCR side, while the project is based on modern open-source technologies without any vendor-locking. From the technologies used, we choose: PHP, Laravel, OctoberCMS, MySQL, ElesticSearch, CSS, NuxtJs, VueJs, Cypress to ensure automated tests.

We have prepared a solution that:

• it is extremely fast, visually pleasing and intuitive to use for the end user
• it meets all SEO standards and best-practices to ensure the best possible organic flow of customers and discoverability for the end user
• is currently available on istores.cz and in the future also on istores.sk with planned use for simple and quick launch of other monobrand solutions
• gives the end user the ability to communicate directly with Westech support staff using LiveAgent chat offers integration for multiple payment methods which, thanks to simple configurability, can be managed and turned on/off per-eshop
• we ensured testing and quality control during the entire course of the project
• is integrated with marketing and analytical tools GoogleAnalytics4 and Hotjar
• it ensures the availability of the e-shop for the end user in case of failure of any of the links in the ERP chain – businessbox (connection of several customer ERPs and the e-shop together with unified management of products from these several systems) – e-shop

03. The result

The result of joint efforts is an e-commerce solution that is modern, fast and user-friendly, which was confirmed by numerous positive responses from end customers.

A simple approach to products with an attractive visual and straightforward UX ensured an increase in the conversion rate and, compared to the client’s marketing actions carried out in the past, a multiple increase in turnover during their duration.

Thanks to our colleagues from SCR® design for the top-notch design and sophisticated UX.

The solution is available at: https://www.istores.cz