The succes of Rob The Gourmets’ Market webshop

Facilitating a customised flexible e-commerce platform by integrating Magento and Akeneo PIM.

client

Rob The Gourmets’ Market

Website

www.rob-brussels.be/nl/

scope

One central e-commerce platform: Magento with integrated Akeneo PIM system

tools

Magento

Akeneo PIM

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Rob The Gourmets' Market is a deli where craftsmanship is central: they sell a wide range of high-quality, local and fresh products from mostly small producers. You can interpret that wide range broadly. They offer more than 1,500 organic products, 400 types of cheese, 2,200 different wines and many more local delights. Their skilled artisans include bakers, fishmongers, cheese makers and grocers. The target audience Rob is aiming for are customers looking for taste experiences and willing to pay a bit more for them.

Rob The Gourmets' Market originally had a digital wine shop and a general website, in addition to their physical shop. Their concept - gourmet deli - was gaining popularity in Brussels, so they wanted to grow their digital story as well. Especially as their clientele in the Brussels region not always got to the physical shop easily due to increasing traffic jams and roadworks. They therefore decided to engage PHPro to integrate their digital efforts into one e-commerce platform. The user experience (UX) of the foodie customers was central to this and deliveries had to be possible across the country.

Magento and Akeneo PIM for a user-friendly e-commerce platform

Magento and an integrated Akeneo PIM system were chosen as the solution. This was integrated with Rob The Gourmets' Market ERP system Microsoft Navision, now known by its new name Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Which systems did we integrate?

Magento:
A powerful open source e-commerce platform that lets you build and manage online shops. Magento allows software developers to build highly customisable (modular) and scalable online shops. The big advantage of Magento is that you can easily adapt the webshop to the customer's needs.

Akeneo PIM:
Akeneo PIM (Product Information Management) is a powerful software platform that lets you easily manage, organize and centralize product information. A feature of e-commerce is the enormous wealth of merchandise product information. That information must be correct, consistent and legible in the webshop, otherwise customers will drop out.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central:
A comprehensive ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution that helps companies manage finance, inventory, sales, purchasing and other critical business processes.

After a journey of about 9 months, in September 2017, the deli supermarket launched its webshop. This trajectory seems long, but is fairly short given the complexity of this type of webshop. First, there was a thorough investment in analysis: what is the best solution and how do we approach it?

After the functional analysis, the real work started: setting up the webshop with all the accompanying products. These thousands of products had to be documented in the PIM system with photos, product descriptions, ingredients, nutritional values, allergens, etc. It soon became clear that the efforts of this labour of love paid off: they easily attracted twice as many visitors to their website and the bounce rate dropped by 32%.

Refinement of webshop functionalities

In 2022, Rob The Gourmets' Market returned to PHPro with a new challenge: due to the great success of their webshop, it needed to be expanded with additional functionalities. Following challenges came their way:

Many orders: they received too many orders via their e-commerce platform, which meant they could no longer follow them up as well.
Deliveries: some customers ordered a lot of products, which caused delivery issues.
Variable daily prices: the problem when working with food products is that there is often a daily price per weight. Flexible price adjustments in the web shop were necessary.
Flexible order flow: they needed a flexible order flow when a product was no longer available or when customers wanted to add something to their order afterwards.

At PHPro, we were proud in a way that the e-commerce platform was a victim of its own success. Nevertheless, hands-on solutions had to be sought. From PHPro, we thought it would be an interesting addition to the project to continue building the functionalities of the webshop. Some challenges were very specific, so custom solutions were provided.

Limit the number of orders and delivery dates

To maintain good customer service, Rob The Gourmets' Market had to revise its ordering and delivery procedures. A situation sketch: an order comes in from someone ordering 25 bottles of water for the top floor of an apartment building with no lift. Not only do all those bottles of water take up a lot of space during delivery, they also weigh a lot and water has a low cost. This was not an ideal situation for Rob The Gourmets' Market.

As a solution, we at PHPro first used the far-reaching functionalities of Magento: you can set limits in your webshop, e.g. maximum 50 products per day per order. This was the first improvement we made.
In the future, we also want to set limits based on product categories: for example, maximum six bottles of water per day.

Besides large orders, they also wanted to organize their deliveries more efficiently. Therefore - as the next functionality on the roadmap - we want to bundle deliveries for customers by region. When placing orders, they then have to enter their postcode. Then, based on their postcode, we look at when deliveries are possible to their address.

An optimized, tailor-made order flow

We then provided a customized order flow specifically for Rob The Gourmets' Market in their case. Because you could no longer order the same product without limit and deliveries were no longer possible every day for every postcode, we also had to integrate this into the order flow.

Suppose a product is available when you order it, but this product is exhausted when your order is collected, this needs to be flexibly adjusted in the order and in the invoice. Or suppose that on your selected day, the order limit is full for a certain product, the system should indicate this.

The custom solution we provided works with pop-ups. When you add a product to your shopping basket, you get a pop-up asking if you want it delivered to your home. When you indicate 'yes', you see in real-time on which days it is possible to deliver those products. In doing so, the system takes into account the product category limits per day: days are no longer shown as an option if the daily limit for a particular product has already been reached.

Also in need of an optimized web platform?

Does your company also need a new website, PIM system or fully integrated e-commerce? Let us know. Our experts will be happy to help you think about a tailor-made solution for your specific needs.