Revolutionizing retail; a holistic unified commerce solution for a European footwear giant
eobuwie.pl
Unified commerce, Retail, Magento & Adobe Commerce
The story of how we empowered Poland's largest footwear retailer to rebuild, enhance and transform their eCommerce into a unified, multi-channel experience pushing the boundaries of retail technology.
Background
Our partnership with eobuwie.pl is one of our longest client collaborations, spanning from 2013 - 2022. Initially serving as a technology partner, we rebuilt and optimized their eCommerce leveraging our expertise in Magento (now Adobe Commerce) to cater to millions of customers across 18 markets. However, our contributions went far beyond that. We have been instrumental in driving a remarkable transformation for eobuwie.pl, propelling their growth and commerce capabilities over the past 6 years into one of the best innovators in the retail industry. We've facilitated their expansion into multiple, unified channels; developing a native mobile app, kiosks for their retail stores and even AR foot sizing technology.
Objectives
- 01
Migration and continuous support of their eCommerce on Magento, driving improvements to search, performance and front-end theme.
- 02
Develop an API to build and release iOS and Android native apps to reach as many customers as possible across 18 markets
- 03
Build esize.me, an Augmented Reality tool to size user's feet in real-time using a camera.
- 04
Complete their unified commerce solution with a dedicated kiosk app for the launch of their physical retail stores.
Challenges
- High order volume: eobuwie.pl processes 60 orders a minute, requiring highly robust systems and infrastructure to ensure efficient order management
- Multilingual and multicurrency support: our client's operations spanned across 18 markets, involving settings and configurations specific to each one, which added complexity to the implementation.
- Omni-channel integration: supporting 36 physical stores with a total of 2000 kiosk tablets running the in-store application, along with millions of active native app installations on Android and iOS required seamless integration and synchronization to ensure a unified customer experience.
Implementation
Magento/Adobe Commerce support and performance optimization
We began our cooperation with eobuwie.pl by undertaking the migration of their ecommerce to Magento, ensuring seamless transition and improved functionality. Alongside this migration, we developed a new Magento front-end theme based on their design, and over the years continuously enhanced it to accommodate design and UX updates. The checkout and category views were also completely rebuilt, resulting in improved performance and an enhanced customer experience. We integrated numerous third-party systems for payment, shipping, SEO, marketing, and analytics, streamlining their operations and overall efficiency. Finally, to improve search capabilities, we implemented a dedicated search engine solution based on Apache Solr. Despite the constant growth in traffic and order volume over an 8 year period, our continuous support enabled the store to operate without interruption.
Mobile API and native app development
To build a fast native app for eobuwie.pl, our backend team created a state-of-the-art API to communicate with the eCommerce, which avoided the need for most of the Magento platform, allowing our mobile team to deliver outstanding performance. Our team then designed and developed the first native apps for iOS and Android, which have achieved remarkable success, with over 3.5 million downloads across both platforms. The native apps were built using Kotlin and Java for Android and Swift for iOS. We also leveraged Firebase to provide services such as analytics, remote configuration, cloud messaging and database, ensuring a robust and efficient app experience. You can learn more about the mobile eCommerce experience by watching our Mobile lead's presentation at the 2021 Mobile Trends conference.
Looped video of customer walking into eobuwie.pl physical store and tapping on esize.me tablet screen. (No audio)
Launching a new retail concept
eobuwie.pl wanted to enter the retail space, but a big challenge was appealing to both the large group of online customers, as well as customers who prefer shopping offline. What resulted was the launch of a new and innovative physical store concept. eobuwie.pl removed all shoes from shelves, instead relying on 30-40 kiosk tablets connected to the e-commerce via Firebase, that allow customers to browse the entire catalogue at their own pace. The store is connected to a warehouse with hundreds of thousands of inventory waiting to be picked up and tried on in an open space with plenty of comfortable seating.
To bring this concept to reality, we created the Magento Kiosk app, allowing customers to browse and select shoes from a wide range of brands. Once chosen, the shoes are swiftly delivered from the warehouse for customers to try on or purchase. This unique approach combines the convenience of online shopping with the tactile experience of trying on shoes in-store, resulting in reduced wait times, increased customer satisfaction, and the option for customers to have out-of-stock items delivered either to the store or their home the next day. Furthermore, the stores also integrated the esize.me program we built, allowing customers to use special scanners to find the perfect size for their feet.
Outcomes
- 01
We've helped eobuwie.pl dramatically cut technical debt and improve performance; the ecommerce handles 200,000+ transactions daily across 18 markets, and ran continuously for 8 years with our support
- 02
Our solutions support 36 stationary shops with around 2000 tablets with our kiosk app installed, and 2.6 million and 1 million active users on Android and iOS respectively.
- 03
Our support with integrations and implementation has helped eobuwie.pl gain market share and transform their digital experience, and in 2018 was awarded Most Innovative Customer Experience at Magento Imagine.
