Case study: Fashion online shop for Bornowa GmbH

17.10.2013, Louis Bataillard Louis Bataillard

At the beginning of every online shop project comes a kickoff-meeting where the customers' requirements and goals are quantified. During this initial interview, the following four points have been identified as cornerstones of the Fashionstylers.ch project:

• The client estimates a quick growth of their online shop with a steadily rising number of visitors per day
• To save time and money a high automation grade is important for the client
• The product range is aimed at young people
• The product range is quite extensive and increased daily

Based on these four cornerstones we have been able to identify additional requirements for the online shop which will be analysed in detail in this case study.

Quick growth planned

To ensure an online shop's high speed and responsiveness even with many concurrent visitors and page views, a professional hosting partner has to be consulted. It is also recommended to select a hosting solution that is easily scalable. Scalable in this context means that it takes only a short time to increase the server's resources and make it even faster. This is crucial for an online shop where the number of visitors can grow exponentially and is very hard to estimate in advance.

For this reason scalability was one of the core requirements when selecting a hosting partner for this project. The hosting partner that was chosen in the end offers a few more useful features targeted toward a Magento online shop such as a caching solution that can be directly implemented with Magento. This caching solution helps minimizing the load on the hosting server and thus enables even more visitors to browser the online shop at the same time without slowing it down. Thanks to the scalable infrastructure provided by the hosting partner the online shop has this far been operated without any major disruptions.

High automation grade for the most important processes of the Magento online shop

As a startup company, Bornowa GmbH has only a limited budget. To keep the costs down it was thus requested by the client to ensure as much automation as possible when developing the online shop. The expected exponential growth that was mentioned earlier also plays an important role here: It is no problem to manually handle 100 orders a day, but as soon as the online shop grows a bit the order reach a number that can hardly be handled manually in a short amount of time. But with a high automation grade of the order processing, even a tenfold increase of orders can still be handled quite easily by the online shop without a notable increase in manual labour.

The first step for ensuring a high automation grade was a process analysis. This analysis identified a few core tasks that were eligible for automation.

One example of this automation is the shipping slip: It can be used as a returning notice as well. This makes it a lot easier for the customer to return some products from their order. It also enables the employees of the online shop to process the returned products much faster. If the client wants to return some products, all that they have to do is mark the returned products on the shipment slip and include that slip with the returned products. The employees of the online shop can then see all the relevant information of the order as well as the returned products right on the shipment slip.

Payment processing was another area which has been mostly automated for this project. The invoices created in the online store all include a pre-printed VESR payment slip which can be used by the customers to quickly pay the invoice via any swiss bank. For the shop owner this also means that any payment can be processed fully automated, since the VESR payment slip includes a unique number that is linked to a specific order. All the customer has to do to process the daily payments is import a file provided by their bank with the payment details, and all the payments will automatically be processed by Magento.

This automated payment processing also enables a fully automated dunning process. If an invoice has not been paid after a specified time period, a payment reminder is created automatically and sent to the customer by email. This means that the shop owner won't have to create any payment reminders manually.

Young target group

The online shop's trendy product range is clearly aimed at a young target group. Especially in this target group the competition is very strong because of the fact that most young people like to spend a sizable amount of their money online. For this reason it was important to ensure that Fashionstylers.ch is aligned properly with the needs and requirements of young people.

This alignment begins with the design of the online shop. Bornowa GmbH chose a design for the shop that is young and trendy, just like the product range of the shop. Another important factor when selecting a design was that the design works well on mobile devices. Especially among young people the usage of mobile devices for web browsing has increased during the last few years. This also means that and increasing number of online purchases are placed from such a device. It was thus a requirement that the online shop works well on these devices. A first evaluation of visitor statistics shows that this decision was correct: A sizable amount of visits comes from a mobile device.

Another important expectation of the online shop customers is a quick and secure payment process. For this reason Bornowa GmbH decided to also accept the major credit- and debt-cards for payment. The young target audience of the shop has no reservations using these payment methods online. The client selected Saferpay as a payment gateway and MobWeb was able to easily integrate this payment processor with Magento.

Extensive product range with daily changes

During the initial phase of the online shop it was important for the client to find out which products their customers like and adjust their product range accordingly. For this reason it was very important for the employees of the online shop to be able to quickly add and remove products from the shop. Additionally, many of the products come in different sizes and have very different attributes. With Magento's core functions and a few extensions, MobWeb has been able to create a process that makes it very easy for the online shop employees to manage the product range accordingly.

Handover and further maintenance

In addition to the fully developed Magento installation on the hosting server, MobWeb has also provided the client Bornowa GmbH with an extensive manual documenting all the various tasks required in maintaining the new online shop. This manual can be handed out to the employees of the online shop and help them with their daily work.

The online shop was launched on time on September 1st and has since been developing very well. Various adjustments and optimizations have been worked into the shop by MobWeb, helping Bornowa GmbH with the daily maintenance of their online shop.

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