Magento and DirectSmile integration for personalised gift shop

The Challenge

3P Direct Ltd were already well established in the online print and packaging industry, supplying a wide range of B2B sectors. Their expertise in print related products provided a unique insight into the B2C market in relation to launching a new personalised gift website - GiftPup.com.

3P’s original sites had been built by another Magento agency, but following a tender process, they chose Absolute to make their printing http://www.ukprintprice.com/ and packing sites http://www.ukpackaging.com/ responsive and to upgrade the version of magento, whilst improving speed and security.

The existing GiftPup site was also built using Magento, but as demand grew, it became apparent that a more engaging user experience and improved web-to-print functionality would significantly add value to their offering.

Testimonials

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Throughout the project, the team have worked with us to meet all of our needs. We especially found John (web developer) to be very attentive, facilitating modifications and supportive with teaching the team on how to use the platform. Overall, we are extremely happy with the outcome of our website and would recommend Absolute for any brand wanting to set up a new website".
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Owner, Crown French Furniture
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Managing Director, Kartiera

DirectSmile integration

3P identified DirectSmile – a German marketing automation solution – as the perfect partner, but they needed a full-service agency they could trust with their brand, user experience and, critically, the development know-how to integrate Magento with DirectSmile.

In fact, at the point the project began, Magento (which currently accounts for over 20% of the top 100K websites using Ecommerce technologies) had not been successfully integrated with Direct Smile. A number of posts in DirectSmile forums drew a blank and even now they’re some of the only relevant results when searching for ‘Magento and DirectSmile’.

What we did

Given the investment in the DirectSmile technology, it became apparent that Absolute needed to design a site with something unique; something that hadn’t been seen on other personalised gift websites before. Something innovative that would give the site a competitive advantage, but also something meaningful for the user and not just a gimmick or cosmetic treatment.

As part of our planning process, which included user experience workshops and detailed wireframing, we developed the concept of an online personal shopping assistant – we call this the ‘Ross Box’, so named after one of our design team!

From the home page the user is encouraged to enter the name of the person they’re buying a gift for. They’re then asked to select their relationship with that person from a drop-down list that is automatically filtered by sex if the name can be distinguished as male or female. A suitable featured product is then sent to DirectSmile, personalised and displayed on the site within seconds, giving the user the option to buy or view more related gift ideas.

When shopping for further gifts the user is presented with three more featured products, which again have already been personalised with the chosen name. They can then continue to refine their selection by choosing an appropriate occasion.

Brand & Integrations

With the concept of an online personal shopping assistant in place, we set about refining the existing brand and designing the whole website interface, considering the different user journeys and product types – text, image, text and image, multi-page documents.

The Magento development fully integrates with the DirectSmile API and not only provides the photo-realistic personalised preview images but also generates the print-ready artwork for each order.

Further integrations were also required for each supplier to ensure orders and artwork seamlessly integrated with each different print management solution.
Because each supplier has different estimated production and delivery times, we also extended Magento to include per-product statuses, all controlled by the various supplier APIs.

Shipping functionality was also enhanced to present to the user the optimum methods and pricing, depending on whether each supplier charged on a per-product, per-SKU, or per-consignment basis. The client is now undertaking a comprehensive marketing campaign so we are looking forward to seeing how the site performs, both in terms of an improved user conversion rate on-site and streamlined logistics and administration for the business.

If you are considering a Magento integration with DirectSmile or another complex third party software, please get in touch.