Modernization of Client Portals Brings Six-Fold Increase in Conversions

Customer

The Customer is a US telecommunications company delivering mobile products and services. They support the governmental program funding phone services for the low-income population and encourage consumers to apply for the program online on their website or via agents in public places. Besides, the Customer’s business includes an ecommerce element as they sell affordable mobile devices and hotspots online.

Challenge

The Customer ran two Magento-based websites – one for subscription services and mobile devices sale, and one for hotspots sale. Though the company used a free Magento Open Source edition, the cost of support services was rather high for them. Besides, they had serious concerns about the solution.

Poor customer experience. The critical problems that ruined opening and conversion rates were slow loading speed and recurring issues with connecting to a payment provider at the checkout (resulting in cases of valid credit cards being rejected). Also, due to an error in the setup of configurable products, the websites featured an obsolete product catalog where each variable product appeared on a different page. What is more, the design of both websites was non-responsive on older versions of browsers and some older mobile devices. Taking into account the target audience of the Customer’s business (low-income citizens), this considerably decreased the mobile traffic.

Low solution adoption by the team. The Magento admin panel wasn’t user-friendly for non-techies, so content and product managers of the Customer had to contact their Magento support team often for assistance in their work. Besides, they reported the redundant functionality that wasn’t used and only hampered their daily activities.

The Customer looked for competent ecommerce consultants to design and implement a cost-effective solution to improve the websites’ performance and UX as well as to optimize the admin panel for the team.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s team commenced their work with determining the reasons for the websites’ poor performance. Knowing that at certain points the Customer had worked with different Magento development teams, ScienceSoft’s team suspected a lot of modified code, perhaps even overridden Magento core files. The code audit revealed abundant legacy code that affected the websites’ operation and load time.

The poor code quality, rich Magento functionality that was excessive for the Customer and the high cost of support services made ScienceSoft’s team question the reasonability of using Magento for the Customer’s business. As a solution, they offered to migrate the websites to a CMS platform more suitable for the company and move from a self-hosted server to AWS.

Among the available CMS options, ScienceSoft opted for Pimcore. The platform offers rather simple ecommerce functionality, but it fully sufficed to the Customer’s needs. Besides, the Pimcore admin panel is user-friendly in accordance with the wishes of the Customer’s team.

ScienceSoft’s team configured the application for the Customer’s company (created relevant page types, data objects, etc.). Though the websites’ design remained the same, they delivered an optimal viewing experience for all screen sizes and browser versions. The full migration of company data from Magento to Pimcore followed.

Next, the team integrated the Customer’s CRM system (BeQuick) and analytical software (Marketo) with Pimcore for automating data flows between them. As a result, the analytical system tracks all the actions visitors perform on the websites, which gives insights into customer behavior and helps improve the websites’ UX further on. The CRM system automatically captures all the customer and order information from Pimcore so that the Customer’s team doesn’t need to arrange the data manually. The products (mobile devices and hotspots) are uploaded to the CRM system. In Pimcore, product managers just choose what items are to be displayed on the websites.

Upon agreement with the Customer, ScienceSoft’s team migrated the business data from the on-premises data center to AWS hosting. It suits the company best as allows hosting several websites on a single Amazon EC2 instance. Besides, the decision to migrate to AWS took the administering burden away due to sufficient reliability, scalability and security provided.

Results

UX changes implemented by ScienceSoft exceeded expectations and brought a six-fold increase in conversions on the website. Besides, the migration to Pimcore allowed the Customer to save on rewriting Magento code and customizing the platform for their business. Now, they have their websites built on an optimal platform and don’t overpay for Magento support. As a result of the migration, the websites work flawlessly. Performance, product display and browser compatibility have been significantly improved. The page loading time has decreased from 2 sec to 0.2 sec, which considerably improved the websites’ opening rate. The Customer’s team learned quickly to manage the two websites from the same Pimcore back end. Now, they don’t need technical assistance to manage the content and products.

The company has an AWS hosting package best-suited for their needs. ScienceSoft keeps on providing managed AWS services to process change requests, monitor security and manage data backups.

Technologies and Tools

Ecommerce: Magento Open Source 1.9.2.0, Pimcore 5.0

Web hosting: AWS OpsWorks, Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Route 53