Slow Cosmetique is first of all a movement with the goal of promoting an eco-friendly and ethical approach to manufacturing and using cosmetics, “striving for responsible natural skincare.” To this end, the Slow Cosmetique Association created a marketplace where natural skincare producers and manufacturers that share their principles could, without an intermediary, reach customers directly. Brands that have received the Slow Cosmetique Award are welcome to market and sell their products on the platform.

Strengthening its commitment to steer the cosmetics market towards a more natural and responsible approach to skincare, Slow Cosmetique wanted to support new features in its marketplace that would improve the customer experience and allow vendors to take full advantage of the platform. scandiweb helped make this happen by migrating the platform to the latest version of Magento with ScandiPWA frontend, introducing new important functionalities to the marketplace, and making sure the overall performance of the system was improved.

Challenges

The Slow Cosmetique marketplace was running on an older version of Magento that neither allowed us to further develop the solution nor install the latest extensions to enable the functionalities the organization required. The platform also performed poorly on mobile devices, negatively affecting sales figures.

It was clear that we needed to upgrade to the latest version of Magento and make the marketplace more mobile-friendly. One major challenge we encountered was capturing all the customizations for the systems integrated in the old platform—ERP, payment, Unirgy, and other modules—and ensuring that they continued to work seamlessly on Magento 2. Another big challenge was migrating their blog and, in general, the website content without losing SEO score and traffic.

Solutions

We migrated the Slow Cosmetique marketplace from Magento 1.9 to Magento 2, redesigned the storefront, and enabled new functionalities. 

ScandiPWA

ScandiPWA was the best solution for a mobile-friendly storefront. It was easy to install, fully customizable, and offered improved user experience with quick page load time and optimum performance on mobile devices.

PWA or Progressive Web App is a web application that also acts like a mobile app. And ScandiPWA is the quickest way to set up a Magento store as a PWA. ScandiPWA is a PWA theme for Magento 2 that supports 350+ Magento features and conventional extensions from the Adobe Commerce (Magento) Marketplace. With readymage hosting, also by scandiweb, development and production environments can be set up in just 15 minutes. 

Unirgy

The target system was partially built with Unirgy, a marketplace module for Magento which allowed Slow Cosmetique to onboard external vendors who could then begin offering their products on the marketplace. Through the Vendor Portal from Unirgy, vendors could manage their own catalog. We retrofitted this portal into the platform, essentially fitting in a second admin panel for vendors.

Through the Unirgy module, the vendors are able to:

• Manage their catalog: product details, prices, and limited promotions
• See their transaction history
• Perform other actions related to product and account management
• Transfer funds out of their Slow Cosmetique wallet
• Manage their microsite data

A microsite is an online boutique where all the products offered by a single vendor can be explored by customers. It’s a space where vendors can describe their business and create an opportunity for customers to better relate to their brand by providing more brand-specific content.

It is also the Unirgy module that makes multivendor single checkout possible. Customers can add to cart products from different vendors and complete their transaction with a single checkout. Meanwhile, fulfillment is fully managed by Slow Cosmetique.

Using the Unirgy module helped reduce the product delivery time and lessened the custom modules that had to be written to achieve similar functionalities.

MangoPay

We fully integrated MangoPay for end-to-end payment handling between customers and vendors. Shoppers buy directly from one or more sellers on the marketplace—when they pay for their orders, the sellers are immediately credited with the proceeds. 

With MangoPay, a payment system for marketplaces, transactions between customers and sellers are frictionless. MangoPay’s efficient wallet management system ensures that the sellers get paid for the products they sell right away, without major involvement from Slow Cosmetique.

More enhancements

With the upgrade to Magento 2, the following new features/integrations were made available:

• Subscription and recurring payments
• Paypal express checkout
• Ambassador referral tracking
• Integrated blog
• Sendinblue email marketing
• SalesManago customer engagement platform

Our SEO team was also involved during the migration to ensure that the new marketplace was optimized for search engines, with the goal of increasing organic traffic as well as improving the experience for users browsing the site. All the URLs on the Slow Cosmetique marketplace are SEO- and user-friendly—from the product pages and vendor’s boutiques to category pages and filtering options—that no user could ever get confused while navigating the platform.

Results

• The Slow Cosmetique marketplace, currently with more than 300 brands on board, now flaunts a contemporary redesigned storefront that is user-friendly and mobile-optimized—resulting in improved customer experience and mobile performance.

• Page load time throughout the website is no more than 2 seconds. The industry standard is between 0 – 4 seconds, with the highest conversion rates occurring on pages with load times of 0 – 2 seconds. 

• The ambassador referral tracking feature has resulted in enhanced engagement with influencers.

• The integration of the MangoPay provided a reliable way of processing payments between Slow Cosmetique and vendors that payments are now flowing swiftly between parties.

• Unirgy being fully integrated into the platform ensures that onboarding of new vendors and processing of orders will continue to proceed smoothly and hassle-free.

• The new features added to the platform has improved the overall performance of the marketplace and are expected to contribute to higher conversion rates and better customer engagements.

Looking for an eCommerce partner to help you with migration and multi-service integration? Make scandiweb your growth partner. Get in touch with one of our eCommerce experts today to learn more about our approach to platform migration and development.

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