Lifestyle Brand with a Custom E-commerce Design to Match

Earning and maintaining an e-commerce presence requires investing in multiple sectors of a business. A noteworthy sector to examine is the virtual platform that will support your e-commerce business.

One of the platforms that’s experiencing growth in recent time is Magento. This growth can be contributed to stores transitioning into Magento from platforms like Bigcommerce or Shopify. The same popularity of the platform propels existing Magento users to upgrade from outdated versions to the most recent.

For our client, NaturalCuriosities.com (NC), this Magento upgrade was tantamount to improving the virtual operations for his business.The Founder of NC began as a full-time artist years ago, which lead to the creation of his online art gallery. As the name describes, the gallery focuses on art that sees inspiration from nature. While the website sells art to the public, it also maintains a robust business-to-business sector that sells to hotels and restaurants.

Through the years, his art, work collaborations and client base has grown extensively. With an abundant art collection to present online, managing, tracking, and posting new art becomes more complex to process.

Previously, the client’s website was based on the Magento 1 platform and over the years setbacks with configuring and uploading art collections compiled. The previous version wouldn’t efficiently categorize art with associated collections on the site. The unsuitable process also affected product details, searches and load times for the end-user. These inefficiencies affect a customer’s experience, which impacts the conversion rate for any website.

For Natural Curiosities, the Magento 2 upgrade goes beyond necessary custom product categorization and upload times. Some improvements are nearly standard with the upgrade. The increase in better server response and cache capabilities are some of these improvements that effortlessly navigate a user through the sales-funnel.

Magento 2 provides customers with search and filter responses that are faster and categorically correct when searching for the products. The speed and ease-of-use of the website also improves the experience for mobile users. Overall, a Magento upgrade can positively impact more than what an owner originally requests.

For NC, a preoccupying task was cataloging products on the website. Productively uploading photos, descriptions, prices and related information are aspects that were improved with the Magento 2 upgrade. The process, depending on the art piece or collection, was taking roughly 10-15 minutes per item. And when you post hundreds of new products, this becomes a time-consuming job.

Improvements to the upload process were accomplished by creating better product strategies for attributes and their relation to the product catalogue inside Magento. Product strategies address the process of simplifying product attributes for upload purposes.

To understand attributes or attribute sets, one simply needs to understand that products can be different and similar. With art, an attribute can define a theme, trait, style, artist, size or collection group. For example, art may share the same theme, but not the same style. This includes looking-up groups of art that fall under a wider attribute category, like artist or style.

Creating efficient product strategies, simply known as Refactoring, allows the client to eliminate approximately 70% of upload time. With a new process in place, art can be categorized and imported in a single step. With little training and oversight from Endertech, the owner is now saving time and resources to process this necessary function. Properly organizing and uploading product data can be a huge positive effect for any e-commerce businesses.

The proper attribute sets now allow the user to accurately search pieces of art inside diverse art groups. Imagine four separate pieces of art that, when combined, make-up a larger piece of an oil-painted sunset. Properly categorizing the art allows the customer to further customize each of the four pieces inside of this group.

Furthermore, visitors can customize the frames for each piece of the collection, without leaving the page. Accounting for each possible customization, one can envision the number of attributes that are possible when labeling art correctly and efficiently. This problem is now solved.

With the Magento Upgrade, Natural Curiosities has improved nearly all functions of their business. The upgrade improves product uploads, user-experience – desktop and mobile, order processing that also streamlines accounting functions. When new improvements to e-commerce platforms become available, there can be hesitation by owners to make the “leap.” However, partnering with expert e-commerce developers can provide reassurance and trust that your project will be a success.