Sector(s)

Team Members

davidxo, sweetchuck, baluertl, bpstr, herczogzoltan, krispea, petycomp, benjamin.papp

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Cheppers is well known for its commitment to giving back proven technical solutions to the open-source Drupal community and consistently ranks among the top 50 global contributors. The Cheppers team assigned to this project consisted of highly involved members of local and global Drupal communities. Our six-person development team submitted patches to seven different module projects hosted on Drupal.org, not counting the payment gateway module (Commerce SimplePay by OTP) maintained by Cheppers.

Elter Lighting Equipment Technology Ltd. (Elter Világítástechnika Ltd.) is Hungary’s market-leading lighting solutions wholesaler and retailer. It offers a comprehensive product range servicing clients from household customers to interior designers and retailers. The company, led by young generation owners, has invested considerable resources into e-commerce sales to complement their physical stores in Budapest and Szekszard. As their legacy webshop suffered from performance issues and lacked modern features, they resolved to rebuild the flagship elter.hu website.

About the project

Elter contacted Cheppers in late 2019 to re-architect their website and optimize its presence for modern e-commerce demands. As their web business grew, they expanded the range of online retail products, which now required better navigation, more accurate search, and sophisticated filters. In addition, an improved user experience for end customers, interior decorators, resellers, and internal sales staff alike was required.

Elter also requested a solution to facilitate online ordering for custom-built lighting equipment. This required designing a user-friendly workflow that makes placing orders easier for both resellers and interior decorators and capabilities to support their in-shop sales team. A refreshed web design was also critical, along with usability improvements and performance gains. 

By the end of the development phase, we created a complex e-commerce platform that provides a smooth end-to-end online purchasing process that serves every user base. For example, online customers receive fully comprehensive product information and build custom lamps, interior decorators can create recommended purchase lists according to room types, while in-store sales representatives use the same system to facilitate orders. 

Since the client sought a single integrated system to support their customers and reseller partners, we used REST API endpoints to integrate their SAP system into the webshop and put a lot of emphasis on a search-optimized visualization for the website. The continuous SAP-Drupal data connection ensures that the SAP system’s registered products are immediately visible on the website and the stock information is up-to-date. Customer discount and price calculations are integrated with SAP creating a single platform that tracks both physical and online purchases and stock and customer information.

Results

  • The website is fully responsive.
  • An AWS-based auto-scaling hosting solution smoothly serves visitors even when there are peaks in traffic.
  • Compared to the previous website, a 20% increase measured in speed on average despite the added complexity. The change is most apparent on the product search page, where in addition to the drastic increase in speed, the accuracy of the results improved.
  • The organic conversion rate significantly increased.
  • The number of visitors and the visited pages grew.
  • The real-time connection to SAP ensures that updates of the product information and inventory changes are reflected on the website instantly, and it also enables more complex discount calculations.
  • Substantially more information is available about each product, and a product recommendation engine was developed.
  • User segmentation was implemented, so newsletters and promotions can be more targeted.
     

Why Drupal was chosen

As the project included an extensive business analysis phase carried out by Cheppers, its outcome provided our site architect and lead developer an in-depth understanding of client expectations. After reviewing the wide range of digital services Elter utilizes in their business workflow, it was apparent that sophisticated system integrations represent the key value of this development project primarily. Drupal 8, together with Commerce 2, was chosen because of its proven capability of robust integration.
 

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

A significant portion of contrib modules used serve the purpose of several third-party integrations: Search API Solr to communicate with a dedicated search-engine instance; Social Auth Facebook and Social Auth Google to implement the sign-in functionality by major social network platforms; Commerce SimplePay by OTP to open a payment gateway to Hungaryʼs leading commercial bank OTP; Mailchimp and JivoChat connect the site to related marketing automation services; GoogleTagManager to transmit detailed web traffic measurement through dataLayer for more insightful web analytics. Besides these modules used to meet this project’s requirements specifically, the more general Honeypot, Metatag, Paragraphs, Pathauto, Redirect, Webform, and other popular must-haves also deserve mention.

Regarding community-provided themes, the well-known Bootstrap, together with Bootstrap Layouts, offers a solid base to build on the custom end-user-facing theme. Also, the Adminimal package provides a more modern look and feel to the administration interface.