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Magento Commerce for Better Customer Experiences

Current global dynamics and rapid changes in the e-commerce world require a constant need to improve brand communications. Effective sales results, and positive relationships with consumers, must be based on taking exceptional care of user experiences, and important for such a successful implementation is first a solid system. Fast White Cat, a Polish e-commerce house, knows this and recently carried out the task of building a highly innovative Magento 2 e-store solution for one of its clients in the beauty industry.

 

Offline to Online

The goal of the project was to transfer the offline world to the online world — that is, to transfer the highly curated, brand-focused atmosphere of its stationery stores, well-known to customers of the Kontigo brand, to a new online store environment. For this to be successful, the old version of the e-store required an upgrade from Magento to the latest version, Magento 2, for which Adobe security and support are available.

To migrate data, the official Data Migration tool was used. After slight modifications, the command was run, and user entity and addresses were configured. Magento 2 is offered in Community and Commerce versions. Both provide a significant number of improvements over previous iterations; however, to deliver a more highly brand-tailored result, Fast White Cat recommended the client to use an individual customized Commerce version.

Beauty brands are especially faced with the challenge of overcoming strong competition. So developing a highly unique brand-sensitive method of communication to reach demanding consumers with very high esthetic expectations was best. The most important thing is that the subtlety of the brand remains at the center of any change. Both Fast White Cat and Kontigo were guided by this principle, and Magento 2 Commerce was crucial because it allowed and facilitated achieving this goal.

The customized version of Commerce included custom promotions, including 2+2, gradual promotion, safety shopping, a customer satisfaction survey module based on Page Builder, customized checkouts divided into steps, breadcrumbs in checkout, secure buying thanks to SSL, compliance with GDPR, integration with InPost and DPD (delivery), integration with Kontigo Portal for pickup points in stores, and more.

 

Magento 2 Commerce - Do It Better!

The process of choosing between Magento 2 Commerce and Community was guided, on one hand, by the comparison of the two versions prepared by the Fast White Cat team and on the other hand by an in-depth analysis of whether the additional Commerce functionality will be beneficial and fully utilized, in the case of Kontigo. The knowledge of Kontigo’s existing business processes was crucial to help the client choose the most suitable Magento 2 version.

“We started working on Magento 2 with workshops and pre-implementation analysis,” says Patrycja Jaworska, e-commerce manager at Kontigo. “Fast White Cat introduced us to the possibilities offered by Magento 2, and we presented our expectations and ideas. We went step by step along the customer journey and store functionalities. From it, we determined exactly what we wanted to achieve. The workshop also created a skeleton of the e-shop version in terms of modules. The decision was then clear; we decide to use Magento 2 Commerce.”

The latest version of the store has been extended with the Page Builder module, which turned out to be incredibly helpful with priority issues. Page Builder is a great advantage of Magento 2 Commerce, says Elżbieta Pawełek-Lubera, PM at Fast White Cat. “It is an extensive and relatively easy to use CMS, the functionality of which is not limited to building pages. The appearance of the website can be easily changed periodically thanks to content staging. Dynamic blocks and widgets allow you to conditionally change the appearance of a page at any given moment. Then, for example, only VIP customers can see information about a personalized discount on the home page. But with the help of Page Builder, we can do much more, it’s just a matter of our imagination,” she says.

Thanks to Magento 2 Commerce and Page Builder, the Fast White Cat team has also prepared a proprietary solution that allows its client to build pages taking into account the colors and appearance of the individual brand. All brand websites are now built independently by Kontigo without the need to outsource it to external partners. And, another proprietary Fast White Cat solution for this project, a module for customer satisfaction surveys, which was also based on Page Builder, allows Kontigo to independently build surveys from blocks that correspond to the types of questions, place them on the store’s website or send them by email to consumers.

“Survey results can be collected and exported for subsequent analysis,” Pawełek-Lubera says. “It is a powerful communication tool with customers that allows clients to ask about everything.”

 

More Than Communications

With the Fast White Cat project for Kontigo, it was important to adapt the colorful, feminine world of the Kontigo brand to reflect the offline shops. A great emphasis was also placed on the mobile version, which was based on the best current UX/UI practices. In addition to the appearance, functionalities were also important. Fast White Cat developers were able to discover the “secret” desires of Kontigo customers and adjust the functionality to make their shopping as easy as possible. Consumers that are familiar, and have been efficiently moving around the brand’s brick-and-mortar stores, will appreciate the seamless transfer of the brand image and atmosphere to the online environment.

In this case, a completely new channel for dialogue was created with consumers with the implementation of a blog that better positioned the e-store. It also gives the client a new opportunity to present products, positions the brand as a beauty expert and allows users to add products into the basket directly from blog entries.

The project integrated Magento 2 with an SAP loyalty program, and the display function of three different prices was set, which is a brand characteristic of Kontigo's pro-customer approach. Communication in this implementation is therefore much more than previously available. The e-shop speaks to consumers without using words but creates a much more concise and friendly brand impression.

Thanks to Magento Commerce, we used additional tools like Page Builder, Content Staging and RMA, and we added events virtual categories client segments, building filters, optimizers, thesaurus — all those features make the Kontigo e-shop more customer friendly and more elastic.

See the e-shop at https://kontigo.com.pl/.