Bauhaus Croatia

Bauhaus story started in 1960 in Mannheim and is now spread throughout 19 countries with more than 300 brick and mortar stores. Creating unique shopping experiences has been their number 1 thing to do ever since and they are rightfully proclaimed to be the specialist for home and garden. Online store added extra value to their business, building on the tradition of top products and top quality. Less than a year after the launch of Croatian branch, we had a new major milestones to reach: redesign the site, implement Click & Collect functionality and Klevu search.

Bauhaus Croatia approached us late in 2015. Unlike some other Bauhaus branches, they didn’t have a web shop. They had a regular corporate page which they wanted to replace with a web shop. Starting from scratch meant setting expectations right and identifying all of our clients needs. In this particular case, specifics meant creating whole architecture and integrating various systems needed to make the site work accordingly.

Due to specifics, whole site was custom coded. In the end, that resulted in amazing performances of the site and having the control over the architecture. But, how did we achieve that?First, it’s worth to note that our team successfully integrated Magento Commerce, Pimcore, ERP, EDI, SAP and FINA. As you can see, the biggest challenge was making all of them work together.

Bauhaus Croatia runs on Magento Commerce 1.14.2.4 and works seamlessly with all of the before mentioned systems.

To explain in more details, here are the reasons why they were chosen.

While some of them (such as EDI protocol and FINA – a Croatian agency that has a web service for fiscal receipt validation) were a prerequisite due to croatian laws or shipping service, others were a choice. Reason why we chose to integrate Pimcore with Magento is the fact that our client needed a better and a more efficient system of tracking products. Pimcore is more flexible than Magento and the biggest challenge was found in synchronising attribute sets with attribute values. Solving that with custom coding and creating special panels for relations between products, attributes, attribute sets and attribute values enabled custom sorting, filtering and search, as well as synchronizing with Magento. Pimcore is also responsible for the fact that all data about every product can be found in one system and then used for various purposes (eCommerce site, mobile app and physical catalogue).

Our team continued with modifying Pimcore so that it works with ERP. After connecting Magento, Pimcore and ERP comes the integration with payment gateway and shipping service via EDI protocol.

For the accounting, we’ve integrated Magento with SAP which now generates various daily reports in formats needed for SAP and ERP and communicates with payment gateway throughout.

Roughly translated, everything except for the layered navigation was custom coded.

This doesn’t mean the site is hard to use. Lots of extra widgets were added to make the content administration and adding more complex elements easier, without the advanced programming knowledge of the person in charge.

After the launch in June 2016. we continued to work with Bauhaus Croatia on promotion via Google Adwords and continuous support while suggesting improvements.

Nine months after the launch, we had new major milestone to reach: redesign the site, implement Klevu search and Click & Collect functionality.

New responsive redesign brought more than just a new look. With keeping-it-simple-and-UX-friendly on our mind, we created a solution that affected visitors into shopping, coming back and enjoying to look through the products while imagining what they can build with them.

To help shoppers find the products, we implemented Klevu search – one of the most advanced seIf-learning search technologies available for eCommerce. With its semantic search, Klevu has an ability to understand stop words (for, to, and), errors from within the query and inflections whilst automatically adding contextually relevant synonyms to catalog via the metadata format.

Klevu has brought layout options for instant search solutions as instant autocomplete layout and instant faceted search layout. Combined with aforementioned, promoting key and popular products in category and by individual stores has generated better conversions and more online revenue for Bauhaus Croatia.

For customers to check the availability in different brick’n’mortar stores and buy a product in different ways, we integrated Click and Collect option on product level. It is now available to buy and pay products online and get them delivered home, or buy them online and collect them at the store (there are also other options available). Client is very pleased with that implementation, because it also solved their challenge with product reservation and customer notification when the product is back in stock.