THE CLIENT

eFurniture is a Berlin-based furniture producer that provides high-quality custom-made furniture products. The company owns multiple brands, all of which have a unique philosophy and strategy, but are powered by the same people and by the same infrastructure, both offline and online.

Holzconnection is their original brand that’s been present on the German market for over 30 years. What started as a small family business, ultimately grew to 15 physical stores across Germany and a strong online presence. The overall vision of their online strategy is to introduce their original philosophy to a new audience and provide a unique, innovative and simple custom furniture ordering experience.

THE BRIEF

When he approached us, the client was extremely unsatisfied with the customization level of their existing eCommerce solution and its performance issues that were caused mostly by the large number of available product variations (around 400k variations per product). Along with that, the client wanted to introduce a modern web design with a complex but simple-to-use product configurator that provides immediate 360° view and price updates to any selected product variation.

In addition to the performance challenges, the client requested a platform that will accommodate their specific internal process that isn’t covered by the standard Magento workflow.

REQUIREMENTS AND CHALLENGES:

The most important part in this project was to get the logic right and everything else would fall into place. The correct logic and data structure would facilitate and expedite the import process, retrieving the data from the database and displaying different variation properties to the user in real time.

Some of the more specific problems that we had to solve were:

• An import module to enable the client to upload every product variation via CSV
• Product gallery per every product variation
• Automated mapping of products to their categories based on attributes
• Customized order workflow and notifications to meet the client’s internal process
• Management of prices and currencies on store-view level (DE, AT and CH)

OUR SOLUTION

On top of the Magento platform, we designed and implemented a high-performing product configurator easily replicable to client’s other brands for maximum efficiency of development costs. For example, the total current number of product variations is above 18 mil. while the server response time stays below 300ms.