Prima Furniture
How the re-platformed and custom-designed Magento 2 website propelled Croatia's largest furniture chain to a 500% revenue increase amid the pandemic.
Your eCommerce store can flourish when it is part of an integrated marketing effort and a strategic company transformation. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of Prima Namještaj.
Prima is Croatia’s largest furniture manufacturer and retailer, with 8 factories and 68 physical stores in Croatia and North Macedonia.
Thanks to their timely investments, they were prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic and their eCommerce results in 2020 have skyrocketed.
Partner profile
Over the past couple of years, Prima decided to reposition its brand towards a younger audience.
They focused on modern-style product design, hired famous brand ambassadors, and made an effort to produce lots of high-quality visual content.
Video below will illustrate this:
They followed it all up with a rebuild of the Prima online store and chose Inchoo as their partner.
Challenges and solutions
Analysing the old Prima website, our UX designers dwelled into user recordings to see how users make use of the website.
It showed certain limitations in navigation and search. Important information like delivery time was not displayed.
The solution was to redesign the user experience and to replatform from the old custom solution to Magento 2. This would enable some important customisations for the furniture industry.
UX/UI Re-Design
Good thing about Prima is that they already had loads of great photos. Our idea was to create an airy, light-weight design that wouldn’t detract attention from the products.
New design
;Old design
You will notice that both on the home page and the product pages, the highest emphasis is on these splendid high-resolution images.From the UX side, the designers focused on creating a more natural flow all the way until checkout. Especially on mobile, where the old solution had serious limitations. For example, there was no possibility to filter by more than one attribute.Also, the product pages were enriched with more product information, and this is where the online store adds value to physical shops.
Well-presented product info is important because many customers use the online store for research before showing up at the physical shop to actually buy.
Tailoring Magento 2 to specific business requirements
The first and most important step in the development process was to integrate Magento 2 with Prima’s version of the Navision ERP and their custom SQL database.
The goal was to make sure that all the products and attributes are correctly communicated to the store. We then looked to best use the potentials of Magento 2 to drive growth for this specific partner, a large player in the Home & Garden industry.
Being also the manufacturer of the products they sell, Prima wanted to offer customers much more flexibility. They needed a custom product type that is specific for furniture retail – the Modular Product type.
It is similar to the configurable product type, one of Magento’s 6 default product types, only it adds the possibility to configure the product not just by attributes, but also by components or modules.
When choosing a corner sofa, for example, the customer can adapt it to their interior by excluding certain modules. As with default configurable products, customers can configure modular products by attributes such as color and material as well.
Prima also offers Furniture Assembly Service. Its price can vary significantly for configurable and modular products. It is for features like these that Magento 2 is best suited, relying on its solid integration with Navision ERP.
The option to add Furniture Assembly Service is nicely integrated into the shopping cart page. The customer can select it and get a clear overview of the total sum.
The price of this service can vary significantly for complex types of products, but the integration between Magento 2 and Navision enables the price to be calculated and presented before finalizing the Checkout procedure.
With the Furniture Assembly, the merchant adds another revenue stream for its eCommerce store, while the customer benefits from an extra layer of flexibility.
We’ve also customized the In-Store Pickup feature for their 59 retail centers. This was done for the Magento 2.3.0 version at the time, and it proved to be an extremely valuable asset in the pandemic-affected circumstances.
Results
The new www.prima-namjestaj.hr was launched on 26 September 2019, giving it roughly 6 months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
In that period of time, and right before the total lockdown that happened in March 2020, Total Revenue grew 98% compared to the same period last year. With the improved user experience on mobile devices, Mobile Revenue grew 103% before the pandemic – in comparison to the same time last year.
The Covid-19 lockdown lasted until May 2020 in Croatia. The website was able to handle 2-3 times more visitors than in the same period last year. This kind of spike in web traffic might have generated problems on a weaker platform, but on Magento 2 it just meant more conversions.
The increase in revenue has been steady even after the reopening of physical stores in May 2020. Although you may think that many customers may prefer the brick-and-mortar approach, especially when it comes to furniture purchases, Prima’s revenue is still growing for +241% to this day.
And during the full year since the launch, the Prima online store grew as much as +501% in Total Revenue and +618% in Mobile Revenue year-over-year.
As we’re publishing this case study, Prima is celebrating the 1st anniversary of its new Magento 2 store launch. On that occasion, the company is offering a special discount to its web shop visitors in the week of the anniversary.
This is just a continuation of their successful marketing effort that made Prima one of the best success stories of 2020.
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