Online store for a large jewelry company on Magento 2 from Avivi developers

One day, visitors to the Kyiv Jewelry Factory (KUZ) online store noticed a small announcement in the header: "Visit the updated site." Such initiatives are not uncommon, especially for stores of large companies with a large list of products and by default promise visitors an updated design, improved UX, new ideas and opportunities that will only make using the site better. It was the same this time, but few people thought that the link led not just to the updated pages of the existing site, but to the fundamentally new online store of the Kyiv Jewelry Factory, created on the modern Magento 2 platform to replace the previous CMS. Now we will open the veil of the unknown and share a successful case of development and cooperation with customers, which will certainly be useful to all business owners with similar needs.

Online store... from scratch?

In the minds of most users, the website they visit is simply a collection of text and images, buttons and links that generally enable them to buy products and receive them in the mail. So if something changes on the site, it seems that it is empty — well, isn't it difficult to change the color of a button or some picture? However, from the point of view of online store owners, any changes are a difficult and painstaking process that must be justified by need and justified by expediency. And from the side of the developers, it is generally complex and responsible work, the result of which depends on the business of the customer and the comfort of visitors to the resource.

And now imagine that the transition to a new platform is a process when absolutely everything changes and from the previous resource you can fully transfer only text content and information from the database. Everything else is completely new material and content, taken from the Magento 2 platform or created individually.

The updated design of the KUZ online store is actually a completely new design created by the Avivi team taking into account the features of the previous one. It is worth noting that we have extensive design and development experience in the jewelry industry, as our company has been cooperating with seven brands operating in the jewelry and jewelry market for a long time. The expertise of our employees, combined with the study of global trends and best practices, guarantees the creation of effective solutions for profitable online stores .

Advantages of Magento 2

If in the front-end development we are talking about complete novelty, on the back-end we have a wide use of ready-made solutions from the platform. Magento 2 is a powerful product for eCommerce, which "out of the box" has a large set of interconnected tools. Trade catalog, product card, shopping cart, personal account and much more — all this is already embodied in the code and is almost ready-made, which greatly facilitates the work of bekent developers. They do not need to think through and create the logic of the future project, but only need to systematize and get the CMS elements in order.

This is an absolute advantage of Magento 2 over other similar products, but it is worth noting the controversial points of this approach:

●     "Almost ready" does not mean "ready", as, for example, it works in simple website builders. For flawless operation, every element of Magento 2 must be carefully configured and tested by developers;

●     Like most out-of-the-box solutions, CMS gives a lot of freedom of action, but also imposes certain limitations. This is extremely annoying when turning the layout, since design solutions cannot always be implemented with regular functionality;

●     Each business is unique, so the wishes of customers may differ from the capabilities of Magento 2. Extensive libraries of add-ons created by the community of this CMS will not always come to the rescue. Therefore, custom development does not lose its relevance even in the case of using this product. Fortunately, the Avivi team can realize wishes of any complexity.

Until now, we have looked at the project through the eyes of business owners, developers and visitors to the online store, but the use of Magento 2 has an advantage for another category of users — employees of KUZ, who administer the site. We will not draw analogies with the admin panel of the previous platform: in fact, they are all similar to each other and have an identical structure. However, Magento 2 is more user-friendly, structured and understandable from the very beginning of using the product. Therefore, the customer's employees did not need much time to understand our help with the new functionality: for convenience, we created clear instructions for internal use.

Improvements and custom development

Avivi developers implemented more than twenty unique tasks on the project to improve Magento 2 functionality or implement special requests from the customer. In most cases, this is related to the addition of the visual part: the fact is that the structure of Magento 2 and all additions to the platform does not provide for the exit of elements beyond the boundaries of ready-made blocks. Therefore, if you need to cover the area of another block with a slider or a drop-down menu, it is almost impossible to do it using standard methods. We would like to dwell in more detail on the most significant and noticeable solutions for site visitors.

It's mine slider in the Collections tab

Immediately on the main page of the online store, we can see the collection cards. By default, this is a static block with a built-in image slider and button — similar to a standard product card. However, at the request of the customer, a pop-up element with a description of the selection of goods was added to the Collection card. The solution turned out to be quite successful, so later the product card was also modernized: the "Buy" button was moved to a similar element, but unlike the previous one, it goes down, not pops up. Thus, it is no longer possible to see the standard product card from Magento 2 on the KUZ website.

Filtration

The previous version of the KUZ online store had a typical solution for filters: a list of categories on the left side of the window with drop-down filter lists and checkboxes. In the new design, we offered a horizontal list of filters above the product cards. Since there are quite a lot of filters, the term is hidden in the slider, which does not prevent users from piling up unnecessary elements while viewing content. Lines with checkboxes appear in drop-down menus that overlap content and disappear after applying a filter. All this is a complex custom development for the convenience of jewelry and jewelry buyers.

Slider comparable

The ability to compare products is gaining popularity among users, especially when it comes to jewelry. However, the goods have a different list of characteristics and their description, so it is not always possible to organize this process conveniently and competently. For comparing products of the Kyiv Jewelry Factory, we have created a special slider that allows you to add an almost unlimited number of products. Its feature is fixed fields, which is not found in any standard Magento 2 tool and system add-ons. Thus, visitors to the site always see the title of the characteristics of the goods for comparison, which can be scrolled freely in the slider .

Good decision, excellent result!

At the end of a really big job, first of all we want to thank our customers from KUZ for their cooperation: the decision to switch to the well-known international Magento 2 platform, as they say, is timely and extremely important. As of today, more than 30% of all eCommerce sites work on Magento 2, which positively affects business owners, their employees and, of course, visitors to online stores. This platform is actually universal and allows you to implement almost any needs of customers. This project significantly enriched the experience of Avivi developers and opened up new opportunities that will be useful to our customers. So if you are interested in the opportunity to switch to Magento 2 or organize a new business immediately on this CMS — we will be happy to help in this project!