mydeco.com uses Magento for its design boutique
mydeco.com has launched a new kind of shopping basket in its design boutique section that allows customers to buy products directly from different designers. The project was realised with the open source solution from Magento that was customized and flawlessly integrated into the main website by the german company Visions.
Find out more about Magento and mydeco
About mydeco
mydeco was founded in 2007 by the management team behind lastminute.com one of Europe’s most successful online businesses ever. The mydeco website was launched in February 2008 and immediately attracted public attention because of it’s unique blend of search aggregation, interactive planning and visualisation tools and social networking capability. The company has partnerships with some of the top retailers from the world of home wares such as John Lewis, Heal’s and Lombok.
The Design board of mydeco includes the leading design figures Sir Terence Conran and Philippe Strarck and on the website customers can choose from a variety of 2 million products from over 700 retailers. Special features like the 3D room planning tool enable the customer to visualize the furniture in its environment and develop an individual design concept. Here the customer can choose from over 30000 3D pieces of furniture that can be integrated into the customized rooms.
On the mydeco website you can choose from over 1000 “buy the look” room ideas and from a variety of user generated room designs that can be published on mydeco.
The design boutique
The design boutique offers a great collection of products from different designers. Here you can buy directly from these designers with a single basket for all products within the design boutique. Magento’s unique template system made it straightforward to integrate the basket completely into the look and feel of mydeco’s web site. And because design and business logic are clearly separated, the basket can stay abreast with updates to mydeco’s user interface. The result is an exellent shopping experience.
Paul Chudleigh, the CTO at mydeco, is content:
“It was a priority for us to make sure the basket fitted seamlessly into the site and did not feel like an ‘add-on’. Since relaunching design boutique with the new ebasket, customer experience has been greatly improved and as a result we have seen an increase in sales, which is great.”
Magento Modules cusomized and implemented by Visions
Visions is a german e-commerce consultancy specialized in implementing Magento as a platform for large projects. Visions competency in extending Magento includes extra features and the integration of external enterprise systems from accountancy to logistics.
Alexander Ringsdorff, Visions’ CEO:
“mydeco’s innovative business model does not square well with closed source e-commerce solutions”
With the Visions solution independant designers can add items to my deco and add their stock levels and delivery times – through the Magento administration panel. The customisation of the Magento access control system made it possible.
“Because Magento is completely open and has such an excellent software design, it was possible create a supplier management module to suit mydeco’s needs – without breaking compatibility with future Magento versions”.
The function of the basket that splits up orders by supplier and exports them to the external systems was also added to Magento by Visions without making changes to the core code of magento so the extensions are “future safe”.
“With traditional enterprise software, mydeco would have needed a complex and expensive mesh of ERP, CRM and e-procurement systems that could not have met their time-to-market objectives. We are really seeing how open software drives change in this market”.
