BACKGROUND
The client, a successful restaurateur in Italy saw a tremendous opportunity to bring exotic Italian coffee beans and coffee machines to restaurants and consumer homes across North America. The client chose a pure-play e-commerce business model to gain a competitive edge over other players in the market, and to ensure swift delivery to his clients.
They were already working with a graphic design team based in Italy, and they wanted to retain them for delivering design assets. After evaluating several e-commerce solutions providers based in U.S, the client decided to partner with our team because of our experience working with startups and our in-depth knowledge on leading e-commerce frameworks.
The client was looking to build an e-commerce portal with the following sophisticated features to sell coffee beans, pods and machines:
- ✓SEO management- Allow administrators to rewrite URLs and add keywords for digital marketing and search engine optimization.
- ✓Catalog management- Provide permissions easily for inventory managers to add, categorize, update and manage product catalogs effortlessly
- ✓Payment Gateway Integration- Integrate online payment system for secure and easy e-commerce transactions
- ✓Order management- Allow order tracking, right from the time it is placed till it is shipped and delivered.
- ✓Customer account management- Help manage customer information, product reviews and wish lists for better engagement and marketing.
SOLUTION
Our team developed a feature-rich e-commerce portal using Broadleaf Commerce, an enterprise class e-commerce framework built on Java, Spring Boot and Dockers. Using Broadleaf Micro Services, we customized many of the framework’s components to accommodate client’s business needs. We then integrated the solution to stripe payment gateway to facilitate e-commerce transactions, and FedEx shipping module readily available as a plugin with Broadleaf Commerce, to facilitate auto-shipping. Here are the key features of the solution we implemented.
- ✓Product Information Management- The client has 5 different kinds of coffee machines, and different pod sizes and flavors that go into these coffee machines. The product information management tool intrinsically available in Broadleaf Commerce allows the client to add new product names, descriptions, marketing information, prices, URL information and promotion details.
- ✓Order Management- We integrated the application to FedEx shipping available in Broadleaf Commerce, to fulfill orders placed via website for coffee machines, pods and coffee beans. The shipping module has inbuilt order tracking capabilities that enables customers to track the status of their order.
- ✓Stripe Payment Gateway Integration- The site is integrated with Stripe party payment gateway that helps customers to checkout and pay for the merchandise using secure interface.
- ✓Product Notification- Often times, the business runs out of certain flavors of coffee pods that are in demand. We added custom product availability notification features to automatically notify customers via e-mail when products in their wish list become available again. When the inventory in the backend is updated, the application checks for all users who have that product in their wish list and notifies them via e-mail.
- ✓SEO- Through SEO features available with Broadleaf Commerce, we configured SEO friendly URLs for all product pages.
RESULTS
The sophisticated e-commerce portal built by our team provided a superior online shopping experience for Momento Italiano’s customers, and served as a platform for the business to market the products successfully in U.S, starting from New York.
BENEFITS
- ✓Strong foundation- Broadleaf Commerce, a leading enterprise e-commerce service provider in the market is built using micro services architecture, which makes it an extremely customizable solution. This serves as a strong foundation for the client’s future business needs as the business grows.
- ✓Out-of-the-box solution- Rather than building a solution from the ground up, we developed the portal using an off the shelf product. This helped the client save substantial upfront cost, without compromising on future scalability.
- ✓Increased visibility into inventory- The administrative control we developed as part of the solution provides complete visibility into inventory and helps effectively track order life cycle.
