Decoupled Magento B2C Ecommerce Website Helps European F&B Giant In Direct Consumer Relationship
Introduction
The client, a European based Food & Beverages giant, wanted to build a direct to consumer business for the first time. They wanted to speak directly and interact directly with their consumers. The project was conceptualised as an omnichannel experience in which the consumers could buy their amazing bespoke and handcrafted products and have them delivered to their homes. The consumer was being given the option to experiment with the flavours and personalise the confectionery as per their taste. They had around 1,500 combinations of ingredients and product types to create their own personalised product. The consumer also had the option of personalising the packaging and adding messages to the cover in case they wanted to gift the product. This was to be made available to the consumers from branded boutique confectionery stores, from an online portal and also from Kiosks placed in premium confectionery partner stores.The client had onboarded one of the world’s largest marketing and advertising firms to solve the primary problem of the lack of a direct to consumer touchpoints.
Objective
Setting up direct to consumertouchpoints was a challenge as they did not have the means to look at primary data on consumer behaviour. They were also trying to address customer shopping behaviour change due to the arrival of large online retailers. Spiralling marketing spend on various platforms was also a growing concern for the client.
The marketing consultants wanted to build a platform that could offer
- Fluid interface with an app like experience
- Unified customer profile management
- Frictionless onboarding of customers
- Online shopping
- Ability to update / revamp the user interface without reworking the e-commerce part
- A closed network of kiosks in an offline mode
- Detailed reporting capabilities
- Multi channel order notification including SMS
- Tracking of parcels on multiple service providers
- Validation of deliverability based on postcode
- DIsplay of Instagram feed on home page
The system should offer the ability to
- End-User
a) Create a custom product based on type, ingredients and size
b) Customise packaging and messages - Administrator
- Order moderation workflow
- Order verification workflow
- Generate job cards for kitchen staff
- Ability to input ingredient and nutrition info
- Print ready PDF
Solution
Zyxware was chosen for the project primarily because of our expertise in building e-commerce portals and experience of having delivered projects in a timely manner for our enterprise clients. Our history of working in tandem with branding and advertisement companies to engineer their vision also played to our advantage.
A tech stack of headless Magento to handle the eCommerce part and an Angular JS based front end UI was chosen for the project. The backend build is based on a KOT (Kitchen Order Tickets) workflow. It basically deals with transferring an order from the table to the kitchen. We have created a custom extension in Magento for implementing the same. It has been built with a drag and drop interface so that the kitchen and consumer can use it easily with a touch screen device.
SAP’s Customer Identity and Access Management software (Formerly Gigya) was chosen as the tool to build silo-less customer profiles which can provide customers with a seamless and personalized experience across all digital channels.
We have used ‘Worldpay’as the payment gateway solution because of its state of art payment solutions. Worldpay offers quick checkout, easy order management and highly detailed and flexible reporting which made it a very easy choice. It did not have a Magento extension available at the moment and we have created a custom extension built for that.
Another service integration done was for Route Genie - a leader in carrier management service. They provide complete control and visibility over the management of carriers, optimising the processing of collections and labelling through to track and trace all the way to the final destination. Route Genie is integrated with the leading carriers and provides real-time consignment tracking of parcels from retailer to the consumer. Route Genie also did not have a Magento 2 extension which was custom built by us. We’ve also integrated a solution to check the serviceability of the location to which the products are being shipped.
The client also wanted to promote its Instagram channel which was being used by them to communicate directly with their consumers. An integration was provided to showcase the Instagram feed on the home page.
The project had multiple stakeholders for design, SEO compliance etc. So it is a complex project management environment.
Results
The website was launched to much fanfare and media publicity in the UK as a pilot in Q3 2019. Encouraged by the runaway success of the project, the client has replicated the same model in 5 more countries. The platform is now also being reused for another brand of the same client.
