Category Archives: Food & Beverage

Revolutionizing B2B Customer Engagement a With Game-Changing Conversational Commerce Solution

About the Customer:

The customer is a globally recognized powerhouse in the consumer goods industry. With a fruitful partnership spanning multiple years, we have been privileged to assist them in turning their digital vision into a reality.

Business Challenge :

After having revolutionized customer-brand engagement in B2C, Conversational commerce is making way for game-changing customer interactions in B2B and B2B2C segments as well . With the rise of messaging platforms, AI-powered chatbots, and virtual assistants, B2B companies are embracing conversational commerce to enhance customer experiences and drive business growth.

Conversational commerce enables brands to offer real-time support and personalized recommendations, address queries and share product information (catalogue, product pricing, availability status), make purchases and transactions, all in real-time –  from a single channel!

Realizing the potential of Conversational commerce, our customer wanted to streamline their brand-customer interactions using the latest tools.
 

Embitel Solution :

Given the deep trust established through our extensive understanding of their business processes, Embitel was the clear and natural choice for our esteemed client as their long-term trusted partner for ecommerce implementation.

Embitel’s proficient team of digital commerce consultants and solution architects organized an ecommerce consulting workshop in collaboration with the customer team.

Through an in-depth analysis of the customer’s needs, the teams jointly determined the development of a Proof of Concept (PoC) for Conversational Commerce, specifically tailored for their B2B and B2B2C business line.

The PoC was developed for their flagship Electronic Local Modern Trade ( eLMT) solution. eLMT is a B2B modelled Progressive Web App on Magento 2 for smooth Salesmen and Retailers interaction.

To enhance real-time transactions and meet the customer’s requirements, a comprehensive roadmap was devised. Some key attributes of the PoC include:

Key Highlights:

• One of its kind: Our one-of-a-kind PoC blends the power of conversation with native social commerce features like cataloguing and FAQ interaction to enable streamlined transactions for B2B segment.
• Multichannel Social Commerce features: For multichannel customer engagement, the PoC was designed to deliver native social commerce features through ‘WhatsApp, Line, Facebook Messenger
• Go Global, Grow Bigger: Build once, deploy everywhere! Expand effortlessly into multiple markets and channels, making your business the talk of the town in no time.
• Insights Unleashed: Brace yourself for data-driven dominance! Our PoC delivers invaluable shopper engagement data, empowering you to make smarter decisions and conquer the competition.
• Meta & Magento Magic: We’ve seamlessly integrated our creation with Meta and Magento Commerce, giving you the power of two juggernauts in one comprehensive solution. Say hello to streamlined operations and boosted profitability!
• Scalability + Savings: The build once, deploy everywhere model also means that your could enable Conversational commerce across new channels thus making way for auto scalability and a lower total cost of ownership.

  
  Additionally, the conversational commerce solution would enable the following transactions between the brand and the customer.

  • User Verification based on phone number through API client
  • Sending Catalogue and Product information as a URL or document requested by customer
  • Browsing catalogue, selecting from list listed brands/product categories/offers
  • Product selection & checkout
  • Order confirmation

  The team developed a custom controller to establish smooth and real-time conversational communication between Messenger app APIs and the Magento server.

Embitel Impact:

The implementation of the conversational commerce Proof of Concept (PoC) proved to be a tremendous success for the customer.

The PoC effectively showcased the potential of conversational commerce and demonstrated its value in improving customer interactions and driving business growth. Encouraged by the positive results, the customer is planning to scale up the solution to test additional features and functionalities.

This transition is driven by the high success ratio and the customer’s confidence in the potential of conversational commerce to further enhance their brand-customer transactions.

Tools and Technologies:

Magento Commerce: Powering the customer B2B website

(WhatsApp/Facebook/Line): Messaging Client

Webhook : To  establish seamless communication between messaging app and backend

JS based Custom controller: Created to ensure smooth communication between messenger and  Magento server

Development of a Scalable Omnichannel Digital Commerce Solution on Magento 2 Commerce Cloud

About the Customer

Our customer is a leading hyper-local, hybrid retailer, headquartered in Asia, offering a wide range of products catering to multiple customer segments. This includes FMCG, fashion and lifestyle, consumer electronics, homestyle – to name a few.

Business Challenge

The multi-format retail group already had a functional ecommerce store, powered by
Magento Community edition. Over the years, the website had a lot of added custom codes with varied enhancement objectives.

When the customer approached us, they wanted to move to a more stable, secure, scalable and manageable ecommerce platform that would leverage the enterprise capabilities of Adobe Commerce Cloud.

Additionally, with the replatforming, the customer desired to achieve the following digital goals:

– Achieving 15% improvement in the performance of the current ecommerce store was the primary goal.

– The ecommerce store had around 16K people shopping at every peak hour. They wanted to further enhance this by 25% in the following year.

The webstore had a complex structure featuring around 50k+ SKUs, 10+ customer groups, store-wise inventory and pricing with near real-time check, with throughput exceeding 4K RPM.  The migration had to be done without affecting the existing data and system.
 

Embitel Solution

Our Experienced digital commerce experts conducted a detailed technical workshop to understand and analyse the business challenges.

Following this, our consultants undertook the following activities:

• Analysed the requirements and business goals of the customer
• Evaluated their existing business model
• Assessed the areas/modules that needed focus to achieve scalability
• Defined and created a digital strategy and an ecommerce & IT roadmap that delivers profitable growth

After the technical review, it was decided that the ambitious retail ecommerce solution would be developed using a combination of robust software including Magento 2 Commerce Cloud 2.X and a no-Sql based bespoke inventory and pricing engine.

The platform enabled the customer to have near real-time dynamic pricing and inventory management, stability, and performance improvement more than the targeted 15%.

Rewriting the legacy code within 4 months of development timeline for such a large multi-format retailer was a challenging task.

Embitel’s digital commerce team decided to rewrite the code rather than the preferred refactoring mode usually taken by other vendors, despite the shortest duration available for the platform migration.

Here is a quick snapshot of the various phases and features of the Retail ecommerce solution developed during our collaboration with the customer:

1. Ecommerce store migration
• Migrate the customer’s Magento Community store to Magento Commerce Cloud
• Migrate Pimcore to the latest stable version & improve website performance
• Migrate Picker, Rider and Hub Manager App APIs
• Migrate the Customer’s mobile app for iOS & Android APIs
2. Third-party integrations
• Payment Solutions and platforms including Razorpay, CCAvenue, PhonePe, Paytm, CoD & more
• Logistics Service Provider
• Mail (Transaction e-mails, Customer account registration and password management, NotifyMe)
• SMS service provider (Transaction related, Customer OTPs, Forgot Password registration, customer login, notify me)
• Loyalty and Rewards Software Solutions
• Appsflyer – unified marketing platform
3. Other highlights
• Our team created a new bespoke Inventory and pricing engine entirely from scratch. The team also ensured smooth integrations with the heart of the platform. This engine is highly scalable and helped improve the performance issues and other difficulties encountered on the old platform.
• We also modified the Mobile app and website to handle a new category of fashion with its own configurable product set up
• Our team replaced the old Payment gateway SDKs with the latest ones that were inherently safer.
• We also enhanced the platform to handle the unique requirements of the Fashion business category.

Embitel Impact

• We were instrumental in deploying a highly intuitive and user-friendly retail e-commerce platform with the new bespoke inventory and pricing engine in less than 6 months.
• Additionally, the platform supports a range of state-of-the-art features like large inventory, Dynamic pricing, last mile delivery apps, etc.
• The user experience on the website was enhanced multi-fold as navigation was easier and product search and discovery was streamlined.
• The customer requested for a parallel launch of the new platform. Our team was quick to bring in all its expertise and we enhanced both the platforms to work seamlessly, without major disruptions.
• Post the launch of the new platform, the number of orders increased by 20% (approx.) in the first month itself. It was followed by around 80% increase in orders in the second month without any downtime or disruptions.

Tools and Technologies

• Magento 2 Commerce Cloud
• Mongo DB
• Python
• PIMCORE
• REACT
• Native Android and iOS Mobile Applications

Multi-site Implementation Using Magento Commerce Cloud for a Leading Supermarket Retailer in the Middle East

About the Customer:

Our customer is a premium supermarket retailer with multiple stores across the Middle East. The retailer offers its customers great options to buy from a wide array of high-quality local and international products along with a superior shopping experience.

Business Challenges:

The supermarket group wished to leverage ecommerce and mobile commerce in order to deliver world-class shopping experience to its large customer base. They wanted an omni-channel, feature-rich ecommerce solution that can fulfil the following growth goals:

• Offer hassle-free, swift home delivery to the customers
• Enhanced sales through efficient management of the inventory flow
  and retail supply chain
• Improved customer retention
• A smart order management solution that can enable store manager to efficiently manage online orders

Embitel Solution:

Our Digital commerce experts conducted a detailed technical workshop with the customer to gain a deep understanding of their business objective and ecommerce vision. After the technical workshop, a detailed ecommerce roadmap was developed under which it as decided to create web shops and mobile app (PWA) to achieve the business objectives.

Here is quick summary of the different phases of the ecommerce solution developed and released by our team:

1. Magento Commerce Implementation: Our Magento experts leveraged Magento Commerce Cloud for multi-site implementation. Under this implementation, a single Magento instance was enabled to support three major Business units of the retail group. This subsequently helped the customer in considerably reducing their total cost of ownership.
2. Mobile-First Approach: The multi-site solution was developed as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) using React JS. Additionally, the team also developed a cross-platform app using Flutter.

   The team developed 4 Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) for efficient order fulfilment. This included:

   • Store Manager App: We developed a supply-chain module that routes orders to the Store Manager app based on the location specified by the user. This app is used by Store Managers for order fulfilment. This app increased the efficiency and speed of operations and order fulfilment.
   • Hub Manager App: The Hub Manager app receives data from the supply chain module and uses this to centrally manage and allot delivery fleet, across all the supermarket chains. This ensured faster and accurate order delivery to the customers.
   • Picker App: The Picker app is used by the supermarket picker agent to manage the order in case of non-availability of order – through substitution, modifying the quantity, and alerting the customer accordingly.
   • Delivery App: This app is used by the rider/delivery agent to navigate to the customer’s location and deliver the orders within the specified time.
3. Product & Inventory Management: Pimcore customization helped in seamless management of a wide array of products, their attributes, inventory and delivery fleet.

   Magento’s Multi Source Inventory (MSI) management module was setup for more cohesive and unified management of the inventory across all the supermarket outlets.

4. Integrations: The Magento based multi-site solution was integrated with –
   Salesforce CRM for advanced marketing, Oracle Software for Financing & Accounting, and ERP Gold to fulfil specific Business Processing needs.

Impact:

1. Team Embitel’s digital commerce experience and technical capabilities helped the customer to offer an omni-channel commerce experience to their clients. This translated to significant growth driven by:
   • Increased conversions
   • Faster order fulfilment
   • 4X increase in their supply chain efficiency
   • Customer retention
   • Reduction in TCO through technological intervention
2. Additionally, the omnichannel solution enabled the retail firm to deliver to the promise of guaranteed same day deliver to their customers.

Tools and Technologies:

• Magento Commerce Cloud: Ecommerce development
• Pimcore: Product information, inventory management
• React JS: Development of Progressive Web App (PWA)

Development of Multi-Instance B2B & B2C Web Apps on Magento 2 for a Multinational FMCG Brand

About the Customer:

The customer is a world-renowned multinational consumer goods firm. A long-standing customer who has collaborated with us for several years for transforming their digital commerce vision into a reality.

Business Challenge:

The customer brand had very custom requirements for each of their markets that called for deep domain knowledge and vertical experience.  They were seeking an experienced technology partner to help them achieve their ecommerce vision of:

• Increasing online sales
• Achieving successful digital transformation
• Growing online sales across ecommerce models- B2B , B2C, and B2B2C
• Driving new growth through ecommerce

& Create an ecommerce solutions that:

• Fulfills orders through Multi-country, Multi-currency storefronts
• Enhances its Ecommerce potential in B2B and B2C market
• Enhances the buyer experience for the B2B segment

Embitel Solution:

Embitel team conducted a detailed technical consulting workshop with the customer. Keeping in mind the complex requirements of the customer, the multiple market the brand catered to, and the magnitude of the solutions being developed, it was decided to embrace a multi-thronged approach.  In this case study, we will give you an overview of the different projects we delivered to the customer.

1. Project 1- Development of Primary Web Ordering App:

The Primary Web Ordering is a B2B commerce web application that enables the Distributor, Merchandiser, Salesman & Retailers to place orders online in a hassle-free manner.
The web app developed in Magento, follows multi-country framework catering to the region-specific requirements of its customers, spread across the world. The PWO has multiple country sites catering to the UK, Finland, Australia and Italy .

2. Development of Electronic Local Modern Trade ( eLMT) Platform/Application:

Electronic Local Modern Trade ( eLMT) is a B2B modelled Progressive Web App on Magento 2 that facilitates seamless interaction between Salesmen and Retailers . The  eLMT application enables all the retail chains and stores under the brand to purchase products from the latter , which is fulfilled appropriately through brand’s in-house fulfilment centres or intermediate distributors.

The app has three modules, namely – the merchandiser app, the salesman app, the retailer app. Developed in React JS, the eLMT app has been hosted in Magento cloud itself,  which significantly takes care of all the overheads associated with PWA hosting , security management, CDN etc.

The PWA app is is integrated with SAP’s ECC system through which master data for the following interfaces are automatically updated:

Product Master – Product Master data

• Customer Master – Customer Master data
• List Price – Product Price(s) data
• Sales Order – Order getting placed to ECC
• Order Response – The order response from ECC
3. B2B Route-to-market Application (eRTM):

eRTM is a B2B web application developed for retailers and salesman to make orders through the app- to be fulfilled appropriately through the associated distributors.

4. B2B2C Cold Storage/IceCream Ordering App :

This B2B2C Ice-cream App was developed to enable a hassle-free interaction and order management between the distributors and the actual product consumers.

Whenever an end user places an order for his favourite ice-cream using online or offline channels, the order is updated on the database and a distributor is assigned to manage the particular order, based on the location selected by the customer.

The distributor uses the app for order fulfilment, accurate order delivery and invoice generation.  Following are the details of the app:

• Key services including customer services, catalogue and store management , user and order management are managed through  Magento cloud and Magento API layers
• Fastly CDN is used for managing the web application on cloud, and managing data security using Fastly’s web application firewall against security threats.

Additionally, the App also included a special module for order customization based on customer’s preference. This module offers customized icecream recommendation and requirments  based on details shared by user about the party they are conducting – including number of attendees, their ages ( adults and kids), theme of the party, time of the party etc.

Embitel Impact:

1. The customer had a multi-country rollout of these B2B and B2C web apps across geographies.
2. The solution enable them to do profitable online B2C sale, even though B2C was not its core business.

Tools and Technologies:

1. Magento 2 for web development
2. Magento PWA theme for PWA development
3. Fastly CDN for cloud computing