How Eleganza Transformed Mobile Shopping with PWA Studio
Eleganza is a well-known, high-end fashion retailer in the Netherlands, selling brands such as Versace, Michael Kors, Valentino, and many others. Besides its Web shops, Eleganza also has five brick-and-mortar stores across the country. As a seller of premium brands with an expanding international audience, Eleganza is seeing almost 90% of customers using their mobile phones to visit its online stores — higher than the industry average.
Since 2015, Eleganza had been successfully running its online shop and supporting four languages on Magento 1.9.2.0. With the end of life of Magento 1 on the horizon, Eleganza saw an opportunity to transform its mobile shopping experience and leap to the forefront of its market by embracing Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) with Magento 2. As a result, it decided to implement PWA Studio with local Magento Solution Partner Experius.
Some of the other key reasons behind the decision to build the shop as a PWA were the opportunity to decrease server load, especially around peak sales periods like Black Friday; to get a future-proof look and feel; and to realize the blazing-fast shopping experience that PWA offers.
After following the standard industry practice of paying for full server capacity all year while only using 10% of the server just to prevent failure on Black Friday, Eleganza wanted to lower its operating costs. With PWAs, the company also closes the gap between Web design and native design and applies the customer navigation insights from its Magento 1 Web shop to change the user experience on its site. Due to the redesign of the shop, it is now more app-like, with more horizontal scrolling and streamlined navigation, eliminating the need for the standard “back” button typical of most browser experiences.
Eleganza also took this opportunity to enhance several capabilities and integrations to enable a true omnichannel experience for its customers. The company is using Akeneo product information management (PIM) to manage, update, and synchronize product information. It is using dotdigita l for marketing automation and Easy POS Point of Sale (POS) to sync online and offline pricing and inventory. In addition, the Picker warehouse management system (WMS) is also integrated with Magento Commerce.
The Experius team set up Magento for content management system (CMS) pages, including the home page, all of which are fully customizable by merchants via the Magento 2 back office. Now every page is dynamically built by the customer, and nothing is hard-coded to help them keep up with the rapid change in fashion trends, inventory, and promotions.
An important aspect of the redesign was around the checkout experience. The company is enabling address lookup functionality based on postal code through integration with postal validator PostNL and powering autofills via API, both specific to the Dutch store. Customers also now have Delivery Match for same-day delivery, as well as the option for store pickup and shipping provider pickup locations, integrated and presented in real time during the checkout process. Last but not least, integrations with local payment solutions like iDeal and payment service provider MultiSafepay enable Eleganza to offer a range of payment choices to customers.
Within three months, Eleganza’s Web shop was migrated from Magento 1 to Magento 2 using Magento’s PWA Studio. The company is seeing great results out of the gate, including:
* 76% increase in pages per session
* 23% faster average page load time
* 372% faster average server reaction time
“We have seen immediate benefits in our investment in PWA,” said Guus van der Staak, eCommerce manager at Eleganza. “We look forward to realizing additional value in the future as PWA not only brings us to the forefront of our market, but keeps us there for years to come.”
Learn more about Magento PWA Studio here. Check out the Eleganza PWA Web shop here.
Originally published at https://magento.com.
