nopCommerce – ISDK – Omnichannel and eCommerce retail solutions, CRM-marketing

Feb

nopCommerce-upgrade-case-featured-400-200

nopCommerce Upgrade to .NET CORE

Customer

Theater and stage equipment supplier

STEFCO is one of the leaders on the Russian market of theater and stage equipment supply, equipment for entertainment and sporting events. It works with the best manufacturers, such as Harlequin, Tuchler, Gerriets, Milos, ShowLED, Chain Master and others. The company delivers the facilities and does the installation.

Stefco was looking for ways to increase its profits and expand sales. As a part of this plan, the decision was to upgrade the company’s web-store to the latest 4.10 nopCommerce version supporting .NET Core with further intention to migrate the shop to Linux hosting.

STEFCO had a few requirements to the new site:

Improvement of the admin area (more user-friendly with better responsive design)
A possibility to migrate to Linux hosting in future
Better in-store pickup support
Performance optimisation

While planning the upgrade, two significant challenges were identified:

nopCommerce source code and database of the existing site (on nopCommerce 3.70 version) was considerably modified, which made it impossible to upgrade using the normal process
Custom plugins required additional modifications to be compatible with the new version of nopCommerce

See the website: STEFCO >>

ISDK team analyzed the store version used before to find out nopCommerce source code changes. Third-party plugins were checked as well. The areas that required an action to be taken were identified, the following activities needed to be performed:

Implement custom SQL scripts to make a copy of the database without custom modifications
Move all customizations from nopCommerce source code to custom plugins
Review and update existing custom plugins to support the new version of nopCommerce
Perform regular upgrade process from updated 3.70 setup to 4.10 using upgrade scripts
Change custom theme and plugins configuration settings after upgrade to reflect changes in nopCommerce platform and to use new features available in new versions of the theme and plugins

The challenges that were initially discovered, were successfully solved and the transition from 3.70 to 4.10 went very smoothly. While performing the upgrade, all data and settings were persisted and traffic loss was minimal. The requirements outlined by STEFCO were met, the store is now also ready for future migration to Linux hosting.
This case reflects well-known issues related to the nopCommerce source code and database customization that cause difficulties with a regular upgrade process and require extra activities before starting an upgrade. At the same time, it demonstrates how using built-in nopCommerce plugin system can be successfully used for such customizations.

Jan

High-traffic eCommerce webstore Harman.club

eCommerce, Integrationadmin

Customer

GLOBAL AUDIO AND INFOTAINMENT SYSTEM PRODUCER

Harman is one of the biggest players in the audio and infotainment systems industry. Its mass market and professional audio equipment is well known for crystal clear and realistic sound, which became a standard for the whole audio industry. The company includes several brands such as JBL, AKG, Harman Kardon and other.

With the goal of revenues and customer loyalty increase, Harman’s Russian regional office decided to improve their online store. Redesign and enhancements implementation along with scaling up Internet and CRM marketing tools were required.

See the website: harman.club >>

Work on the website consisted of the following main areas.
Introduction of new marketing tools to increase sales, conversion, and general customer brand loyalty:

Integration with Google Merchant Center
Launch of Criteo retargeting campaigns
Integration with a leading CPA network
Site visitors interaction tracking and transferring data to CRM
Widening of the website operations and discount offers
Integration with leading Russian shipping provider PickPoint

SEO optimization:

UI/UX website modifications, adding tags and meta information
Mobile site version optimization
Site loading time improvement (desktop, and mobile view, Google Insights)

See the website: harman.club >>

open harman.club See customer feedback

Apr

E-Commerce Omni-Channel

eCommerce, Integration, Mobile, UI-designadmin

Customer

GLOBAL PRODUCER OF WELL-BALANCED NUTRITION, WEIGHT CONTROL AND BEAUTY GOODS

Herbalife, a worldwide-known producer of nutrition, weight control, and beauty goods, together with Filuet Group, its logistic partner, expands into Eastern and Western Europe.

Entering CIS and Baltic countries’ markets, the customer wanted to introduce a new strategy for market expansion, which proposed an intense use of modern e-Commerce tools. They wanted to create a system of sales channels that would include a single web-store for all new business regions, mobile applications for popular platforms (iOS и Android), and a network of automated self-service kiosks (touch screen terminals). All solution components were supposed to use a single data source as well as centralized content administration tools, and configuration settings pool.

The planned online operations needed to be fully integrated with the existing offline business process of orders processing and delivery.

See customer feedback

The Omnichannel solution required a combination of several external and internal corporate tools, integration with Herbalife ERP system and Filuet Group logistic applications. nopCommerce, a leading Microsoft .NET based solution, was chosen as an e-commerce platform as its plugin-extendable architecture using Dependency Injection pattern provides almost unlimited system integration capabilities.

The following tasks were completed within the project:

design and development of an online-store;
design and development of mobile applications delivering full cart and order sync with the online-store;
integration of the e-commerce channel with the existing offline architecture of order processing, pricing, warehouse stock tracking etc.;
Filuet Group shipping widget embedding;
integration with payment systems, addition of new payment methods using online banking;
integration of e-commerce with vending channels (kiosks, automated sales stores);
implementation of chat bots for customer support.

The system is fully hosted on Microsoft Azure using one of the standard cloud service plans which ensures good stress resistance. This helps the system to show adequate performance: in peak times the site auditory might go up to a few thousands.

Herbalife users got a completely integrated shopping environment. This allowed to increase the number of customers and the average sum of their orders significantly. Customers now can access their carts from all devices, order history is centralized and shows all orders, including offline. For example, an order can be put together in the mobile application while final checkout can be done later via web-store personal account or vice-versa.

The company saw increased customer loyalty, boost in sales revenue and endless opportunities of using marketing technologies – retargeting, upselling, cross-selling, CRM marketing etc.