Agiliway Building A Unique Magento E-commerce Platform For Stone Industry

Introduction

E-commerce has long as transformed the way people do business. Benefits of running a web store being so wide-ranging, every niche in the online commerce world is filled, platforms fine-tuned to perfection and every solution found. Or so it seemed until Agiliway team took up an e-commerce website project aimed to open a gateway to the e-commerce world for global trade in decorative stones and construction materials.

Client’s Challenge

Equipped with a brilliant idea for the future start-up, the client came yet burdened with disillusion. Wholesale and retail trade in decorative stones and construction materials is a niche market that hasn’t yet been filled on a global scale and promised to be a fruitful ground for the e-commerce solution. Two years developers across the world were toiling away to get this e-commerce project off the ground. Built on the Magento platform, the website was meant to give vendors, service suppliers the tools necessary to sell online, facilitate an online purchase, reach vendors and customers around the world. Though Magento occupies almost one-fourth of the market share and offers more than 9000 extensions for building the most scalable startup, the project hit the losing streak. Stones trading and delivery involves a set of unique processes not easily implemented or automated. Following two years of attempts to launch the commerce site, the mountain turned out to be too tall to climb:

• Code didn’t work adequately
• Hours of painstaking debugging proved ineffective
• Too many extensions didn’t provide necessary functionality and clashed with one another
• Unique and complex processes of stones trading and services were not automated
• Functional was neither extended nor customized to the niche requirements
• The client had no clear perspective for ultimate website capabilities he was trying to achieve

Solution

Starting fresh in most cases is far more rewarding and time-effective than rescuing projects in crisis. Yet, Agiliway makes it a rule to put clients’ interests first. Time and resources have been invested into e-commerce website development but the client still had his lucrative online business beyond the bounds of reality.

In view of our client’s prior frustration and an incredibly long wait time, we put together a team of managers, developers, analysts to explore the practical, financial and technical aspects of the project. As soon as they ascertained that the project stood an ample chance of successful completion and all details were discussed with a client, a team of full-time developers, support staff and a few contributing developers set to turn the project deepest lows into the best highs of the future e-commerce platform for global wholesale and retail trade.

Few months down the line and we are pleased to announce that project officially enters the beta stage.

We succeeded in building the platform that

• brings together wholesalers, vendors, service suppliers and retailers around the world, giving them the tools essential to reach the global market for decorative stones and construction materials;
• is optimized for wholesale and retail shopping, products and services trade. Products and services are assigned in following categories: stone specimens, wholesale trade, decorative and construction materials, services;
• boasts user-friendly navigation. As an online store for retail buyers and a B2B platform for wholesale buyers, it’s structured to help customers find products and suppliers quickly and efficiently;
• will showcase millions of products by categories;
• is fully customized to offer wide functionality and respond to the business niche requirements.

According to the niche requirements, Agiliway team has built in specific functions, such as:

• product filtering that allows buyers to refine product searches based on multiple filters: a type and color of stones, country and region of delivery, stones composition, prices and many other attributes relevant to a particular type of the product;
• opportunity for buyers to make a request for a specified number of product units, while sellers offer the price and quantity in return. Following all offers a buyer may choose one to accept;
• a set of partners search tools for sales, manufacturing, purchase, delivery worldwide and at the best prices;
• a few types of basket customized for the business needs, while checkout processes are configured significantly as compared with the default ones;
• several billing methods, including regular payment function once in a certain period;
• opportunity to buy/sell both wholesale and retail products;
• separate admin for vendors so that they could conveniently use all services;
• documents generated during a purchase all tailored for business needs;
• modified and additional automated email tools;
• various membership types for vendors based on access rights (on certain types of functions on the website)

Conclusion

When all of the good ideas are taken and you find one, Agiliway team will find the best e-commerce solution. The e-commerce platform has occupied a totally new niche and our development team keeps its focus on extending its functional (e.g. integration with delivery company services, an abridged version, mobile apps, etc) Managing unknowns is our specialty and we are good at it. Or you can always start with something that’s already working, and we’ll help to make it better.