Case Study: Designing eCommerce Tools for the Future of the Fashion Industry

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Industry: eCommerce, Fashion

Compatibility: Last 2 versions of all modern (evergreen) browsers

Market: International

Products and status

Development services

  • LinebookWEB (18 months)
  • B2B Webshop (4 months / in progress)
  • Catalog (In progress)

Updates and maintenance services (6 months / 1 year)

  • Product rescaler
  • Showroom inspector

Since the whole world moved online in early 2020, people have grown accustomed to the more convenient forms of shopping. Customers expect 24/7 access to all products and want an option to place orders at all times while, in turn, businesses get to see significant increases in sales and spending. Mobile, in particular, proved to be an easy and reliable form of shopping that helps businesses increase repeat purchases and customer retention.

As a result, eCommerce brands are now heavily invested in building solutions to support this growing demand.

But this digitalization is no longer relevant just for B2C interactions. B2B customers expect the same convenience and similar experience. Businesses need a single view of customer data, suppliers, and sales performance, and the core benefits for businesses will be their ability to offer personalized shopping experiences. For this reason, they seek tools that will connect different parties involved in the transaction (e.g., suppliers and buyers) and maximize efficiency and customer service. Software should also streamline the integration of different systems and communication

This increased interconnectivity provides wholesalers with an insight into customer demand which enables them to prepare in line with the market needs. They can optimize all processes, from business planning to stock and supply chain management

Ultimately, digitalization is expected to help fashion businesses flourish and operate much more efficiently.

And that’s exactly what we did for our client.

About the company and the project

Our client works with some of the biggest brands in the fashion industry with a mission to drive transformation and change how people connect with fashion. The inviggo team contributed to the development and maintenance of several products, with different but related goals in mind. Broadly speaking, we helped build an MVP, upgrade the B2B webshop and digital catalog with advanced features for product interaction, prepare the site for peak sales season, connect product analytics, and maintain presales tools.  

Project duration

The Inviggo team was presented with unique requirements for each software. We allocated our time and resources based on the products’ specific needs, with the largest focus on the LinebookWEB, Catalog, and B2B Webshop: 

  • LinebookWEB - MVP development (3 months), new feature updates and maintenance (15 months)
  • B2B Webshop - New feature updates and maintenance (in progress)
  • Catalog - MVP development (6 months), new feature updates and maintenance (in progress)
  • Product rescaler - maintenance (1 year)
  • Showroom inspector - maintenance (1 year)

Our process and key goals

We set out multiple bold goals in accordance with the client’s request and unique product specifications. It was also crucial to align these objectives with the market trends, which meant building and maintaining tools that will help fashion eCommerce brands optimize user experience, provide stellar performance in times of higher user activity, obtain user analytics, revise their strategy, streamline operations, and maximize business performance.

To do so, our developers worked on:

Building a solid MVP

Inviggo developers joined the LinebookWeb and Catalog projects during the MVP development phase. 

This was certainly not our first rodeo; we built MVPs before and we knew it is the best way to test market compatibility and receive user feedback that will provide further guidance in terms of developing new or fixing existing features. 

As expected, working on an MVP improved our focus and efficiency, allowed us to build the most viable product with minimum waste, and significantly reduce time-to-market. 

Preparing for peak sale season

Preparing for peak season in eCommerce involves making the website ready for an expected increase in online traffic and orders. During these times, developers typically face a ton of workload as they need to ensure the website is secure and responsive, and that the inventory and product information is regularly updated to offer users real-time data. 

We entrusted this project to one of our experienced eCommerce app developers who shared the two ingredients for smooth running software during the high season:

  • Code freeze - Once the high-volume activity starts on the user side, developers pause their code work and shift their focus to application testing and bug detection. Once we have the list of issues in front of us, we come up with possible solutions and send them to the QA team for approval. After these are resolved, we proceed with the production release. 
  • Responsive call center - A functional call center is imperative since the number of customer requests goes up as well. Even a brief interruption or disconnection can cause significant losses for our clients, which is why a few developers should always remain available for any customer service emergencies.

But most importantly, developers must think about the results of the task execution in advance. While this is always, to some extent, a stressful period, if a developer ensures the quality of code and optimization during the development phase, the app will remain stable during the peak season.


Creating a functional product page

While some subjectivity is involved in evaluating the quality of a product page, there are several elements that guarantee significant improvement in its performance:

  • Up-to-date product description

Product information heavily influences whether the customer will make a purchase. If the page lacks information or contains an inaccurate product description, users start to question brand credibility. Consequently, the cart abandonment rate goes up while conversions and revenue go down. 

Research conducted by Baymard Institute points out that customers want to learn about the materials and ingredients, product size, features, when and how to use it, its price, store availability, and more. 

For our team, this meant updating LinebookWEB, Catalog, and B2B Webshop to: 

  • include new pricing functionalities and information to include both the wholesale and retail price
  • offer detailed info next to the product picture listing product code, group, color, availability, delivery date, etc. 
  • enable new browsing functionalities so that shoppers can easily find the products based on specific features
  • Realistic images

All product pages must include high-quality pictures (from different perspectives) that will provide potential customers with insight into all visual details. Inviggo developers updated the tools to include:

  • a magnifying glass and the option to zoom in on the picture and take a more detailed view of the product
  • PNG option to save pictures 
  • option to save product pictures as PDFs and print entire windows to facilitate users' digital and traditional marketing campaigns
  • 3D pictures that provide the ‘physical store’ feel
  • Optimized and fast-loading product page

Customers have extremely high expectations in terms of page loading. Almost 50% of all shoppers expect the page to load in 2 seconds (or less!) If dissatisfied with web performance, about 80% of all users will leave the site and never come back to place another order. 

Knowing that just 1 second can result in a significant loss in conversion, the Inviggo team optimized the performance of LinebookWEB, Catalog, and B2B Webshop by:

  • improving Catalog performance on iPad, since customers grew accustomed to cross-device shopping 
  • enabling skeleton loading to create the perception of reduced waiting time
  • creating empty states to facilitate user engagement
  • adding toast messages to offer users key info about the action they took or app events 


Responsibilities

Since the project involved building, updating, and maintaining several eCommerce products, our developers assumed different roles. They were mainly assigned:

  • Team lead responsibilities; our senior developer organized the development team and was expected to provide timeline and workload estimates, communicate with the remote management team, and work on the development of crucial features
  • Front-end development of the layout and integrations
  • Deployment planning and release process


Approach & technology stack

The majority of our tech stack is composed of JavaScript frameworks and libraries as they allowed us to build a seamless and user-friendly experience. Aside from being considered one of the most reliable languages, JavaScript loads quickly, which is particularly important for eCommerce businesses whose success heavily depends on fast product loading and uninterrupted interaction with a multitude of category pages. JS is also our preferred choice for projects that required dynamic product updates.

Here’s a list of key technologies used for each of the products:

Key features

In line with the market needs and the goals outlined at the beginning of our collaboration, all features created and implemented on the 5 products we worked on were mainly directed toward improving UX of their product pages and user data collection. 

If you’re interested in digging a bit deeper into the matter, below is the overview of our work: 


LinebookWEB and Catalog

By building a digital catalog to substitute for a heavy paper one, fashion brands increase their product visibility and exposure. It is a more practical, efficient, and cost-effective way that helps eCommerce businesses and professionals in the fashion industry streamline their operations, increase sales, and boost brand image. 

LinebookWEB and Catalog came with the biggest workload to handle. After months of hard work on MVP development and product maintenance, we:

  • enabled analytics tracking to send data to several analytics tracking systems, that way providing B2B users with key usage information that would allow them to optimize their strategy 
  • built and streamlined the sign-in process by enabling login for different types of users (B2B and BoB)
  • improved product browsing, filtering, and views
  • enabled creating and grouping the list of Favorites, as well as included an export and forward option for specific lists
  • added new pricing functionalities and information to meet the needs of the international markets
  • enabled users to save pictures and print entire windows to facilitate users' digital and traditional marketing campaigns
  • improved catalog performance on iPad
  • created toast messages and empty states for the entire application
B2B Webshop

A bulk of our work on B2B Webshop was focused on maximizing user experience when interacting with the webshop pages and enabling easier webshop usage data collection. The biggest contribution we make to the webshop includes:

  • building 3D product pages for a more realistic feel
  • enabling skeleton loading because even though skeleton screens don’t load faster, they provide users with the impression of faster loading and maximizing UX
  • setting up analytics tracking to send data to several analytics tracking systems

Results

As we wrap up the final stages of projects that are still in development, we reflect on the original objectives and compare them to our results. We are pleased to say that we carried out project development from ground zero to a successful launch, offered support in the development of new features, and resolved critical incidents that occurred in production in a timely fashion. 

We remain on call for any new requests and are looking forward to seeing how our work contributed to a boost in our client’s (and their clients’) business performance. 

Your turn.

Businesses are often reluctant to adopt digitalization, but innovation proved essential to remain competitive; that is, to remain on the market at all. While diving deep into the digital revolution can be a complex and costly venture you may not be prepared for, we strongly urge you to at least dip your toes into the digital waters to see what the options are and what kind of opportunities they bring.