Magento 2 development for Luicella’s premium ice cream store
Staylime engages into Magento 2 development and launches a new store for Luicella’s Ice Cream, providing for compelling user interface design and custom business-specific functionality.
Our customer’s history began in 2013, when a team of good friends, Markus Deibler and Luisa Mentele, decided to open a small shop with homemade ice-cream in Hamburg, Germany. Just a few years later, Luicella’s Ice Cream has grown into one of the most well-known artisan producers and distributors of premium ice cream, sauces, toppings, and related equipment.
The successful brick-and-mortar business was amplified by an online store, where buyers could place an order for Luicella’s craft ice cream online.
Though the solution seemed to meet customer’s objectives early on, it eventually became obsolete without further improvements and support.
Aimed at enhancing their online presence, Luicella’s Ice Cream made a decision to engage in Magento 2 development, replacing the legacy store with a brand new solution that would provide a better shopping experience to their customers.
Through a modern UI and improved usability, along with well-thought-out functional capabilities of the new store, the company was looking to hit a number of strategic goals, including:
Growing relevant traffic to the website
Increasing the percentage of online sales
Improving brand image and customer perception
Moreover, Luicella’s Ice Cream founders were invited to a popular talk show to share their success story with a 2 million audience. Needless to say, the website must have been all up and running by the air date, and boy was it approaching fast.
Magento 2 development approach
With such strict deadline pressure, there was no room for error. We proposed Time & Materials as the most suitable
Magento 2 development model and got down to work immediately.
Establishing an effective project management framework under a tight schedule was a tough call, since Staylime had to ensure high performance and quality in a really short time. We also paid particular attention to ensuring fast and proactive communication with the customer to get their feedback as soon as possible and provide for transparent progress throughout the process.
Besides, the initial design mock-ups shared by the customer were not in line with Magento 2 Guidelines, and required significant upgrade to meet the standard.
Despite the complexity, the challenges we faced made the given project even more exciting and interesting for our team.
Migration to Magento 2
First off, our team took the legacy database and performed its migration to Magento 2 using the official Magento Migration Tool.
We kept close tabs on the process to make sure all the essential data, including but not limited to orders, customers, and products, was accurately transferred to the new platform without loss or corruption.
Prior to going live, we carried out delta migration to transfer new customer and order information.
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From automated database migration to functionality redevelopment and manual resolution of compatibility issues, Staylime takes on all the pains associated with upgrade to Magento 2.
Implementing a signature user interface that would effectively convey the brand message and identity to buyers was one
of the key tasks on this project.
As the quality of the initial design assets was rather poor, our team had to make them compliant with Magento 2
Guidelines and resolve technical shortcomings before exporting the UI mockups to Zeplin for further Magento 2 development.
In addition to that, Staylime rendered Magento design services to account for custom features, having delivered the lacking bespoke mockups
following Luicella’s brandbook.
Custom functionality
We leveraged the latest Magento 2 version available to that date as base and made the most out of the in-built capabilities it provided to ensure the overall stability of the website and quick cost-effective delivery. However, in order to address customer’s specific requirements, our team built a range of sophisticated features from scratch.
As a result, the new website was enhanced with:
Shipment restriction tool
Seeking to avoid melting the ice cream while en route to customers outside Germany, Staylime implemented an algorithm restricting the delivery of melting products to some destinations. During checkout, end-users are suggested to either change the delivery address or to remove melting products from the cart.
To enable the feature, Staylime wrote a single complex backend request for retrieving the delivery map and the list of undeliverable products instead of two subsequent requests for each task, which helped to reduce the processing time significantly. Then, our team designed and implemented a custom popup on the frontend.
Combo pack configurator
A bespoke product configurator introduced on the website allows users to order a pack of 6 different ice cream flavors per their taste.
Making use of the default Magento Bundle Product, we designed a unique user interface mockup for the tool and delivered the required solution quite fast. In addition, Staylime created a custom info popup outlining relevant product details such as ingredients or nutritional value in one click.
Gift cards generator
To support Luicella’s Ice Cream Christmas Campaign, our team designed a special gift card generator for the store. Based on the Mageworx Gift Card extension, the solution allows end-users to purchase gift certificates and share them with friends and family via email, while providing store admins with flexible configuration tools and detailed statistics in the gift card log. The automatically generated gift card codes can be easily redeemed at the checkout.
Advanced filtering & search
Boasting a rich product assortment, Luicella’s Ice Cream website required a fast and easy search to achieve the usability buyers expect.
We assigned intuitive tag icons to available products (e.g. gluten-free, vegan, sugar-free) and so empowered website users with convenient filtering and searching of the desired item in the catalog. Underlined by the Ajax Enhanced Layered Navigation extension, the algorithm eliminates the need of reloading the page when applying filters, optimizing customer experience. By adding the Mageworx Search Autocomplete extension, we implemented a popup with instant search results retrieved from categories, CMS and popular search requests.
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Throughout the years we’ve developed over 100 extensions of different complexity to let businesses implement unique functionality that is not available either with an out of the box Magento installation or in ready-made extensions.
We made our best to meet the 2-month deadline and, thanks to our profound technology expertise and proactive approach towards production planning, we succeeded.
The website was deployed without a hitch just in time before the TV show. With over 35,000 simultaneous users during the peak period, the online store handled the load impeccably, and every feature worked as it’s supposed to.
The brand-new Magento website design and significant performance improvement of the website along with such a strong media coverage has resulted in 30% growth of conversion rates in less than a month — a fabulous outcome none of us, including the customer, could predict.
Since the solution release in September 2017, Staylime has been providing continuous stability and security updates for both Magento and third-party extensions, as well as implementing custom functionality extensions and synchronizing the deliverables with the latest Magento 2 version. Our ongoing contribution helps Luicella’s Ice Cream always keep the website in tune with the changing business requirements and technology advances alike.
