Agradi is a large international webshop, specialising in animal and outdoor living products. The store catalogues hundreds of thousands of items, and the business is expanding into new geographical markets across Europe.
| Launch date | Services |
|---|---|
| January 2016 | UX, design, development |
Approach
With rapid growth in their sights, Agradi engaged Lab Digital to rebuild their eCommerce website with integrated sales and support mechanisms. This has evolved into a valuable relationship with constant collaboration. Flourishing from foal to stallion, Agradi has outpaced competitors to become the biggest webshop in BeNeLux for horse-related goods.
Website rebuild
Agradi’s existing website was built on old technology. The goal was to improve eCommerce functionality, and enhance the customer experience with a new platform: reliable and scalable. This required accurate and comprehensive data migration when rebuilding the site to make it technically robust and ready for commercial growth. The project was completed by a dedicated team in just a few sprints, with Agradi enjoying a seamless go-live transition.
Discount mechanisms
We helped Agradi to create a variety of custom unique discount mechanisms. This included a bulk discount, set discount, voucher discount, outlet discount, sales discount, and a bundle discount. Our set of promotional tools also featured a unique digital sticker promotion; something which sets Agradi apart from competitors. With over 150.000 products and limitless combinations, the discount mechanism portfolio was a worthy challenge.
RMA modules
Typically, around 10% of orders are returned to eCommerce brands. We digitalised the entire returns process for Agradi. Our solution integrated with the warehouse to scan incoming items, qualify their condition, and automatically pay customers back. This is estimated to save two FTE per year and ensures customer satisfaction through quick payment.
Integrations
A wealth of integrations enhanced the customer experience and Agradi’s internal efficiency. Oracle Bronto was integrated as the email marketing solution, sending 400.000 personalised emails each week. We also set up ICEPAY for payments, Sherpa ERP for the warehouse, Beeyond for product information, and Freshdesk for customer support and ticketing.
Technology
Agradi’s infrastructure is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is completely scalable. We used a combination of Wagtail CMS and Oscar, the open-source eCommerce framework for Django (Python). With this mix of ingredients, we could create a wealth of custom functionality for Agradi.
For Agradi, we set up the Python backend using PostgreSQL and ElasticSearch within AWS.
Design sprints
Throughout our partnership, the focus has been gradually shifting towards optimising the user experience and increasing conversion - especially now that a lot of technical improvements allow us to explore those areas. Creating a new and improved interface required Agradi to break with some of the old ideas in order to make room for a more powerful, simplified experience. And that's where the Design Sprint came in. We got together with a large group of stakeholders to define the most critical business problem, ideate, decide, create and validate. All participants felt involved and the results were great.
In one week, we have defined one of the biggest digital business challenges.
Result
Agradi has gone from strength to strength. Expanding into new geographical territories has been successful, with customers across Europe and dedicated eCommerce stores for Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Website traffic has doubled over the past four years, and Agradi now has over 500,000 customers. Further international expansion is on the agenda.
Being able to switch quickly is the key to lasting success in e-commerce.
