Context

Our client is a retail company headquartered in Saudi Arabia, specializing in providing hardware and software solutions to SMBs across diverse industries. To elevate their customers' shopping experience, they envisioned launching a web store featuring a wide array of product categories.

The client's preference was to build the store on the Adobe platform, given their familiarity with its scalability and robust product catalog management features. Furthermore, the retail solution needed seamless integration with various supplier systems to access product information.

After evaluating multiple possibilities, the client chose Hype Software Studio to deliver ecommerce services for this project, drawn by our proficiency in Adobe technologies.

Solution

Our team assumed complete responsibility for conceiving, developing, and delivering the retail solution. We designed an ecommerce store using Adobe technology that seamlessly integrated hardware and software products sourced from various suppliers. In addition, we tailored the Adobe theme to align with the client's requirements, enhancing its default features by incorporating pre-built extensions and making code modifications. This allowed for improved navigation, customized permissions management, optimized shopping cart performance, and other enhancements.

Disclaimer: According to the non-disclosure agreement that we signed with the customer, we cannot reveal the screenshots of the real system. 

Integrated with payment and delivery systems, including ARAMEX, FedEx, DHL, and USPS, the solution consists of an admin panel and a client-facing website. To step up the default Adobe functionality, we added the modules enabling product import from the Etilize file that consolidates product information from different vendors, as well as out-of-stock item replacement with the lowest price items.

Lease feature

Our team also delivered a lease feature for the solution that enables checking whether products are applicable for lease. The customer’s clients provide their rates, and if prices fit the requirements, the products are assigned pop-up links, enabling buyers to see available leases and their terms together with the lease submission form link.

Extensions

Since the customer uses QuickBooks for accounting, our team set up the Magenest extension and integrated the solution with QuickBooks. We also added the Mageplaza promo banner extension for slider banners. In addition to this, since vendors occasionally provide discounts for their products, we added the discount mailing feature allowing buyers to submit coupons, receipts, or product barcodes and receive a check for a particular amount.

Our team also added MageСomp’s Magento 2 Save Cart Pro to the retail solution to enable creating several carts and choosing the cart to add goods to. To ensure payment system integration, we also added the Magenest Moneris module.

Integrations with suppliers’ databases

Considering the customer had several thousand products to manage from different suppliers and planned to grow their supplier base, the retail solution had to be integrated with numerous databases to get product info. The customer’s initial plan was to integrate via API but it turned out that not all of the suppliers had an API and some of them had APIs that were difficult to integrate.

To solve the problem, we integrated the retail solution with Etilize. It aggregates the output file and product pictures daily so that the customer’s website could display correct information about the available products and their prices.

The solution imports product data every night. Initially, the automated process in the background set up product pictures that were ready for display after the product data was imported. The script checked which pictures were already present on the website and then loaded the missing ones. But due to this, the website server’s performance started decreasing. Our team set up an AWS environment that included AWS Amazon RDS and EC2 instances and utilized Varnish Cache to accelerate the site’s performance. As a result, page loading time sped up from 3-5 seconds to less than a second.

The Amazon RDS instance contains the customer’s Adobe database that aggregates product data from suppliers through Etilize. To ensure fast website search, we set up the Elasticsearch node with its own data indexing process performed every night.

Results

We successfully provided a comprehensive ecommerce solution utilizing Adobe technology, which not only expanded the growth potential for our client but also enriched the shopping experience for their customers. Our team additionally implemented various optimizations within the solution, resulting in remarkable improvements such as a significant reduction in page load times, with speeds enhanced by up to 5 times. These optimizations led to the following outcomes:

• 90k+ customers shopping via the ecommerce solution
• 6x growth of partner base
• 300x increase in the number of offered products, including hardware and software items