Floral Market Case Study

    Industry
    Flowers
    Engagement Model
    Time & Material
    Duration
    3 years
    Effort
    80 man-months

    About the Client

    Our Client is the largest floral marketplace in the US. The platform has over 4,000 florists and flower shops offering services to customers spread over 5000 cities in the country.

    The technically well-equipped website allows flower sellers and buyers to effectively interact with each other and handles vast volumes of data and billions of transactions per month.

    The Initial Solution

    The existing site was an “Etsy-type” website where local florists could showcase their flower arrangements. Customers could browse through the various options available, choose one and directly get in touch with the seller to place the order. What was unique about this site was that florists had to upload real photos of their floral arrangements and not put up stock images. This added to the credibility of the site. Additionally, the site featured customer reviews which helped new customers make a purchase decision.

    Business Challenge

    The client approached the Magedia team with the requirement to significantly improve the functionality of their website by improving the built-in processes and systems. The second requirement was to come up with a user-friendly solution for the florists which is simple and will reduce their effort in managing their stores. This involved complex integrations with 3rd-party systems and Magento customization. The solution we developed allowed the florists to sell their products in a much smarter way, boost their sales, and increase income.

    From the project beginning, we started working with the Client on small maintenance projects (slight theme customization for florists,simple import and export operations, specific issues research,customer support, etc.). After our team successfully demonstrated our competence and skills we were assigned more complex technical projects like integration with 3rd-party services (Salesforce,Quickbooks, local payment services etc.) as well as redesigning certain platform functionality to optimize its performance. All work has been done to increase platform performance and stability as well as maintain the order fulfillment KPIs set.

    Magedia’s Differentiators

    Our Work Process

    Our Work Process

    Our ability to work remotely, commitment to meet deadlines set,and winning work methodologies adopted are a few reasons why we were chosen to work on this project. At Magedia we understand that communication is key to the success of any project. So we decided to set up a proper communication process between the Magedia team and the Client s team with the help of the following channels: Slack, Emails, Google

    Hangouts meeting, and JIRA, an advanced project management tool with flexible settings, integrations with 3rd-party systems, task analytics and so on. All these helped us to collaborate smoothly and efficiently ensuring the success of the project.

    Our Team

    At Magedia we understand the importance of teamwork. We assigned three Magento backend developers to the project and they worked along with the client s IT team under a project manager. To make the collaborative process a success we used the Scrum methodology which allowed us to plan certain iterations in the development work in a better way and deliver features in a short time. Following Scrum process practices, we used JIRA with corresponding plugins to plan, track, and analyze the development stages.

    Our Team
    Favorite lists

    Customers can now bookmark products they like into a Favorite list which gets saved in their profile for future use. This new feature allows the florist to share regular updates with customers on the products saved in their Favorite lists – like availability of the product, change in price, etc. Besides, the ‘Bestsellers feature added to the website showcased the most popular and best-selling products amongst marketplace users. This feature also provided sellers with rich data that could be used to plan future promotions.

    Challenge

    Solution Benefits

    Solution Benefits

    • ‘Favorite list’ feature that allows customers to save items they like for future purchase
    • Integration with Elasticsearch – an effective search solution that enables quick and easy search of products on the marketplace.
    • Integration with Quickbooks accounting system allows the sellers to synchronize all the financial operations within the marketplace. The ultimate benefit is that they can see their income and prepare various financial reports in one place.
    • Integration with Salesforce as a 3rd-party CRM and ERP system for florists accounts
    • ‘Tipping feature’ that allows customers to add a tip to the invoice amount as an appreciation for services rendered.
    • Hyperticket feature to customize invoices and order confirmation documents.
    • Magento integration with RabbitMQ was done to create a queue for orders so that the sellers can fulfill them asynchronously. This allows eliminating the time-out issues on the marketplace which existed before this integration.

    Business Value

    Benefits for Client

    • Improvement and optimization of back-office processes
    • An increase in the number of orders
    • An accelerated order fulfillment process
    • The development of new features was time-bound and based on Magento development best practices

    End user benefits

    • Faster order processing
    • Increased site speed and performance
    • Website pages that display correctly on a variety of devices – thanks to the responsive design
    • The possibility to add a tip to the invoice amount and acknowledge the great service provided (a brand new feature)
    • Ability to create a Favorite list and also see the product bestsellers
    Business Value

    Technology Stack

    Platform
    Magento 1
    Programming Languages
    PHP 5.7
    Framework
    PHPUnit
    Web server
    Apache 2
    Database
    MySQL
    Testing tools
    JMeterBrowserstackk
    Frontend
    HTMLSassLessKnockoutJS
    Other Tools and Technologies
    RedisRabbitMQLogz.ioNewrelicElasticsearch

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