Scicon is the world’s leading manufacturer of bike bags—a pioneer in the cycling industry with a presence in over 40 countries. The brand is also the largest eyewear provider for the Tour de France teams in 2022.

scandiweb has been supporting Scicon since 2021 with an eCommerce Growth team. Currently, the company plans to fully optimize its eCommerce store. Part of the strategic roadmap we developed with them was upgrading their Magento (Adobe Commerce) platform and moving it to ReadyMage, improving their store’s page performance, and optimizing their product information management (PIM) system.

In this case study, we’ll focus on how we optimized their PIM setup.

Business needs

The client came to scandiweb with Akeneo PIM Community Edition already set up and several issues. The Akeneo connector they used was poorly built and failed to support important Akeneo PIM functionalities, including:

• URL synchronization through Akeneo and automatic redirect creation
• Image synchronization
• Category synchronization
• Product bulk action updates

With the client mostly interested in addressing the issues they were experiencing, our goal was to tackle their pain points and establish a solid synchronization between Akeneo PIM and the rest of their eCommerce ecosystem as well as to simplify the entire process for their internal team.

Approach and solution

The restrictions of the open-source Akeneo PIM edition, coupled with the troublesome connector the client used, posed several challenges when it came to resolving the synchronization issues and implementing custom functionalities. 

To address the synchronization issues and for us to have more control over the connector, we decided to replace the Webkul connector the client was using with our own solution—the scandiweb Akeneo PIM connector. 

scandiweb has been working with the Akeneo PIM since 2017, even before it had an official connector for Magento (Adobe Commerce). We like to be early adopters and go the extra mile to support our clients, so that’s what we did. We thoroughly mapped and leveraged Akeneo PIM’s functionalities to be able to customize them according to individual business needs. Our Akeneo PIM connector significantly extends Akeneo PIM’s functionalities and data exchange speed.

The custom scandiweb Akeneo PIM connector we used gave us much more freedom with custom solutions and allowed us to improve all the functionalities the client previously had issues with. 

With the client offering many different product types with diverse attributes, managing all of them for multiple store views was quite a complex process for them. But with the solution we implemented, we improved the attribute creation functionality and simplified the related processes for the client—significantly reducing the manual work involved in inputting product info and content in Magento (Adobe Commerce). 

Results

Scicon is now actively using Akeneo PIM for the creation of products, descriptions, attributes, and categories, as well as currency updates for multiple countries.

We successfully replaced the connector with the scandiweb Akeneo PIM connector and addressed all the previously identified issues, plus customizations. 

The following functionalities are seamlessly working now:

• URL synchronization through Akeneo and automatic redirect creation
• Image synchronization through Akeneo
• Category creation and synchronization through Akeneo
• Product bulk action updates
• Product attribute creation and management
• Overall data synchronization improvements & multiple daily backup configurations

With the client fully satisfied with our connector and custom solutions, they are interested in further custom Akeneo PIM improvements and process simplification for their internal team. And we are ready for the next steps to make that happen.

scandiweb is an award-winning Akeneo PIM partner. If you want even more reasons to build Akeneo PIM with us, read about our Akeneo PIM implementation program. Or get in touch with one of Akeneo PIM experts by sending us a message today.

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