Background Story

As a medical shop, Croatian company Medical Direct manages to recognize what problems their clients deal with when shopping. They specialize in the online sales of medical devices and equipment. And seriously take their job of providing the best, most reliable, and high-quality products at affordable prices and superfast delivery within Croatia.

Their owner, Tomislav, came to us in search of a quality solution to his Magento eCommerce, which caused them one too many troubles. The project contained migration from Magento 1 CE to the latest Magento 2.4.4. open source and PHP 8.1. which will be required for all Magento merchants till the end of this year. There goes one trouble away!

So, we got our chance to suggest needed improvements and determine the migration strategy. From day one, our team enjoyed collaborating with the client. They were completely open to our professional advice on further improvements. What they wanted was a simple yet functional webshop to help them continue serving only the best for their clients.

Solution

As with most of our projects, we used our solution for the theme. This gave us the benefit of having a partly developed solution that only needs to be adjusted to customer needs. And for the customer, it meant less development time.

The client wanted to simplify and smooth the checkout process, so our attention went mainly to checkout. We also prepared designs for category page, product page, homepage, CMS pages, blog and blog pages, 404 and maintenance page.

Considering product types, our client needed a solution for simple and configurable products. But we prepared all the others in case our client decides to expand their product catalog. We also added up-sell and cross-sell products to generate our client more profit by providing customers with similar products or products that are usually bought together.

We also used our custom solution – better search suggestions, which enables customers to search for their products easily. The search engine displays instant results to the customers as the results appear after the third letter is entered, leaving you with a complete search suggestion solution, excluding the need for complex and expensive third-party search modules.

This is one of the modules that initially doesn’t exist in Magento, and in Inchoo it is part of our standard offer for the price of installation only.

E-računi (Electronic Invoices)

One of the main synchronizations (not full integrations) within this project was between the Magento store and the E-računi extension, which is a web invoicing, payroll and accounting service. Automatic synchronization means that Inchoo made a tailored way of connecting to e-računi using SOAP API for data exchange.

When a customer makes an order, Magento sends data to E-računi and receives feedback. For this method to be functional, we made a key required to connect E-računi and Magento. We as well made a possibility for full integration if the client made that decision someday. From a business perspective, we did not go with the full integrations since the synchronization covers all client needs at this moment and requires no change in the internal handling of invoices.

Payment

According to the statistics of the eCommerce Croatia association, customers choose to pay primarily with cards (46%), but also cash on delivery (32%), PayPal (17%), and transfer (5%). Except for PayPal, those were the methods we chose and developed for the webshop before the launch. PayPal does not accept payment in Croatian kuna, so it is on hold until Croatia enters the euro area.

The client chose Corvus Pay for the payment gateway, which we also integrated. As mentioned before, customers can also pay with transit and cash on delivery methods. In order to make the transit payment method easier, we added a QR code which is sent to customers with confirmation of order email.

Delivery Integration

The client decided to retain the previous delivery company, which was GLS, and their operating method but also decided to add something new. For this reason, we developed a system that calculates the needed days for the order to be delivered at customers’ doors. The system even considers the non-working days in Croatia and then calculates the delivery date accordingly.

Internal Moduls

This project, as well as many others, is loaded with Inchoo’s “in-house” developed solutions. It contains our GDPR/Cookie Policy, SEO Toolkit, Enhanced Ecommerce, Megapack, Dual prices module, JavaScript bundling and many more.

This gives us a partially prepared solution we found works best in years of our business practice, and what it means for our client is less development hours on the bill.

Results

The new Medical Direct webshop was launched on Jul 11th, 2022. We looked at the data from Jul 11th, 2022 – Aug 22nd, 2022, and compared it to the same time length before the launch, May 29th, 2022 – Jul 10th, 2022. Although we will have to wait sometime to see the results altogether, there were some immediate improvements.