Case study: Decora

Decora is a retail and wholesale company of construction and home improvement materials since 1993, with seven physical stores all over Estonia. Decora’s e-commerce journey started in 2010 with a custom solution on the HansaNet platform. This online store was simple in terms of development, without interfaces and required much manual work. In 2014 Decora moved their online shop over to Prestashop.

As Decora’s eCommerce grows 70-120% each year, the Prestashop solution lacked in interfaces and functionality needed for desired growth and Magento was found to be the better option. Compared to Prestashop, Magento is significantly better known and offers quality support in Estonia.

Magento Commerce

Creating a new e-commerce solution requires not only a competent development partner but also an excellent eBusiness partner to provide additional consulting and progressive solutions. For this reason, Decora chose Lumav Commerce as its new partner and Magento 2 Commerce as their new platform.

Magento Commerce offers many additional features compared to Open Source. For example, the content staging and preview allows you to easily create, preview and schedule a wide range of content updates without involving IT. This way, you can create a marketing plan in Magento that includes all your campaigns and promotions set up and ready to go ahead of time.

Dynamic rule-based product relations help you set automated rules to determine which products to present as up-sells, cross-sells and related products to each customer segment, thus creating a dynamically targeted shopping experience.

For Decora, security and B2B capabilities were decisive factors for choosing Magento 2 Commerce over Open Source. Decora is delighted with the Magento CMS (Page Builder) extension, which makes content management much easier compared to Prestashop, where they had to edit HTML code manually.

E-business analysis

Siiri Tiivits-Puttonen, an e-business strategist at Lumav, has 20+ years of experience in e-commerce, including efficient e-commerce management and development project management. When creating an e-business strategy, she follows the principle that today we don’t create online stores, but instead, we develop e-businesses. If a company has physical brick and mortar stores, it is necessary to think through both channels. Nowadays, 70% of users do pre-shopping or online shopping through online channels and go to the physical store to select products. For this reason, the development of the digital channel is commercially significant.

Lumav’s user interface and design process start with business analysis. The business analysis maps the whole eBusiness. It creates a business plan for the customer that includes marketing activities in addition to development and sets up in-house metrics to monitor the process. Business analysis helps to put together an omnichannel solution where e-commerce is not a single entity but a part of the whole. Therefore all business departments – purchase, marketing, sales, finance, and logistics are reviewed in the business analysis. If you need help creating and eBusiness strategy, contact us!

“I was very pleased with the business analysis because even though I had ideas on how to do something, the analysis revealed a lot of important things that I wouldn’t have thought myself. During the eBusiness analysis process, everyone had their say: what is important to them, how their work process works, and how to set goals together. Business analysis is, and continues to be very important – it should be performed every year to figure out where to go next and what are your new goals.“
Grete Allik, Director of the e-commerce strategy at Decora AS

E-business analysis highlighted the importance of product enrichment. For this, we created an interface with Akeneo PIM. Previously to launch a product, all you needed was a product name, image and description now, in addition to all that, you need to configure attributes, related products, up-sell products and related categories. If you also want to streamline product management with Akeneo PIM contact us!

“Akeneo PIM needs some time to get used to, but it’s an easy and convenient tool for importing products, and it’s a lot faster than the system we had before. I didn’t believe it at first, but when you can import or export everything with Excel, it’s very convenient and time-saving. In our old store, we were able to do mass imports, but not with all attributes, so several things had to be made manually, but now we can import everything at once. The quality of product enrichment is more important today than ever before; and the introduction to Akeneo Pim has simplified, accelerated and made the product creation process easier. There is also a better overview of the sales program: which products are active on the web and which aren’t. Akeneo PIM also allows us to develop further into multilingualism.“
Grete Allik, Director of the e-commerce strategy at Decora AS

Thanks to E-business analysis, Decora has been streamlining and automating processes like unifying customer base, streamlining and make categories more logical across the web and retail and setting up attributes. To simplify the customer base for omnichannel customers and make automated marketing more efficient, we developed an interface with Custobar. For search improvement, we are creating an interface with Klevu. Klevu is a self-learning artificial intelligence-based search engine. Want to integrate Klevu or Custobar with your e-commerce? Contact us!

E-commerce user interface and design

E-business analysis of user interface unveils the design and functionality and leads to the creation of initial prototypes, which are initial sketches with sample text. Wireframes helped Decora get an idea of the new e-commerce user interface and input on how to change internal processes to meet the requirements of the e-business analysis.

Decora wants to keep its online store as modern and customer-friendly as possible. For customers to find everything they need as conveniently as possible, Decora needs to look at their e-commerce with a critical view of how their customers are using the web and whether they are finding what they need. Need help with creating a user interface and design? Contact us!

Effective e-commerce solutions

In addition to Custobar, Akeneo PIM and Klevu, there are many additional features on Decora’s new online store that don’t come with Magento 2 Commerce. Lumav has created a custom shopping cart solution to meet the needs of customers who want product-based delivery times or methods. In cart, products are made into batches according to their estimated delivery time. If you add a product to the cart that has a longer delivery time than the other products in the cart, the order will be in two batches. This solution enables products with shorter delivery times to be delivered earlier.

Decora’s e-business plans for the future are to expand the product range, multilingualism, and improving internal processes.

“I highly appreciate Lumav, because I felt they were always thinking with Decora, and there is a common interest to see real growth in results.“
Grete Allik, Director of the e-commerce strategy at Decora AS

Decora’s recommendations for a successful e-commerce

Carefully think through the tasks.
Discuss important issues with other specialists in the field: whether it’s the best solution or not. Other people have different visions or experiences, and this helps to bring out different situations and nuances.
Listen to the experience: Initially, Lumav’s e-business strategist recommended Klevu, but when reading the Elastic Search description, it too seemed good. In reality, it didn’t work, you can create synonyms, but it just won’t work. In the end, a small saving does more harm than good, and customers are angry because they can’t find products. If they can’t find products, they can’t buy them either.
Don’t rush into decisions immediately; consider them very carefully.