How we do it: Victus - responsive e-commerce website based on the Magento platform

Victus is a brand owned by Victus-Emak Ltd, a distributor of gardening and forestry tools and plant care products. They offer machines and gardening equipment, ponds, cottages and boxes as well as fertilizers, grass seeds or chemicals. Their portfolio includes brands like Oleo-Mac, Victus, Toro, Hozelock, Pokon, Chrysal, Ikra, Haaga, Carlton and Keter. As one of the leaders of horticultural industry in Poland, Victus aims to offer products and services that will make working in the garden comfortable and efficient.

The aim and expectations of a client

The company contacted us at the end of 2014 with their need of making their website modern and up to current standards. Apart from layout metamorphosis, the client presented a wish list that included adding new sales' features to the website.
The necessary change of the current online store was caused by various aspects. After analysis the project with the client, the most important problems were, to name a few:

• Usability aspects, which caused the potential customer to get lost while browsing the website and the purchasing process to be more difficult than it should be,
• The lack of connection between the store and the information websites - they worked separately and had different domains,
• The very outdated version of Presta Shop system didn't meet the expectations of the potential client as well as the administrator of the website,
• The store worked slowly due to used technologies.

Those problems had a huge impact on the increasing the customers' dissatisfaction with the website. Our task was to solve this situation by preparing the conception of the e-store, the recommendation of technological solutions, the preparation of a new graphic design and the implementation of the responsive store based on Magento. The main objective was to improve UX as well as to increase sales.

The scope of the project

1. Workshops, preparation of mock-ups and the specification
   We always want to be well-prepared before creation of the frameworks. This time we analyzed currently used solutions and competitors on the market. We also invited the client's employees, who were committed to the project, to participate in workshops. Furthermore, basing on the collected data, we prepared the set of mock-ups presenting key elements of the store. Our next step was to organize another meeting in order to present our vision of the project and to confirm the way we are going to work on in. After the main conception was set, we prepared the frameworks for the 30 remaining views (for resolutions: 320/480/720/1200px) and started working on comprehensive functional specification.
2. The graphic design project
   Basing on the accepted mock-ups, the briefing and the information from the company, we started preparing the graphic design. The main assumption was to preserve the readability, transparency and the comfort of usage of the site. Thanks to big experience of our designers, we created the modern and intuitive interface's project that is supporting variety of users, no matter if they use tablets, mobile phones or notebooks.
3. The implementation of the store on the Magento platform
   The next step was to implement a store on the Magento Community Edition platform. Thanks to the years of experience and, as always, the effective cooperation, the development team was able to implement the store in a very short time (the whole implementation took three months, and while the programming work alone took 1,5 months), what was crucial in the case of that project because of the approaching gardening season.
   
   In addition to the typical sales system functionalities, few solutions deserve special notice:
   
4. Clients’ ability to choose where they want the package to be delivered to - in order to facilitate the process of selecting a pick up place, site displays a list of collection points sorted by terms of distance from the address given by the buyer,
5. Selecting a service point - for the selected product groups clients can choose a dedicated service point. In the case of collecting the product in person in the shop, the facility where the purchase was made is automatically assigned as the service center,
6. Search engine dedicated to stores and service centers - we have prepared separate functionality that allows to search engine to find Victus-Emak stores and their service centers on Polish territory.

1. The transfer of the product database from the previous store
   When you have a large database of products, it is extremely burdensome and time-consuming to manually enter all the data to the new online store. We proposed a solution whereby Victus-Emak could save a lot of time and money – we conducted imports of all the products to the Magento database using a dedicated mapping data solution.
2. The integration with the storage system
   Among the solutions used by the customer there is the warehouse management system based on Microsoft Dynamics NAV. One of the expectations for the new system was to update the client store’s inventory. The Magento integration with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, even though we worked with it for the first time, was not difficult, and thanks to that customers can always check whether a product they need is in stock.

Development of the system

From the very beginning Victus-Emak prioritized the necessity of matching the Internet offers to customer needs and therefore maximizing the convenience of usage. It is also clear that the purpose of all this is to steadily increase the sales. Vast possibilities of Magento usage and a multitude of ready-made modules greatly simplify this task, thanks to what we were able to make many modifications to the system.

Few of the most interesting modifications

• Preparing print of compared products,
• The extension of the product’s cart with the additional pop up containing the information on costs and methods of delivery,
• Adding the suggestion list of the location as part of stores and service point search engine - this is particularly useful when there are many localities with the same name.

All further work is our best measure of customer satisfaction with what we did while working on the project. It is also confirmed that online shops based on Magento perform well regardless the industry and despite the fact that we were dealing with a “ready-to-work system”, we were able to implement a lot of unique ideas of our customers.

Technologies we used

• HTML5/CSS3/JS,
• Responsive Web Design,
• Magento Community Edition.

Customized modules

• The management module of methods of delivery (helps in management of Table Rates),
• The dedicated management module for choosing a collection and service points during placing the order,
• The search engine dedicated to shops and service points that is including the localization map and address list.

Ready-made modules

• AheadWorks blog module.

Summary

The main challenge that we faced in that project was primarily due to a very short period of time to implement all stages of the project. At the beginning of January 2015 we signed a contract and immediately set off to work, so that the work would be done no later than in the first weeks of April. Not taking anything away from our high quality standards and procedures of the whole process, our hands really were full while working on the project.

At the start of the season we have successfully implemented responsive online store based on the Magento platform for the horticultural industry. Client’s commitment to the project helped in launching the project on time and it went live on 15th of April 2015. The end result pleases not only us - most importantly, it met the expectations and goals that were set by the Victus-Emak.