An SAP Commerce-integrated mobile app for a retail chain
Itransition complemented the customer’s online store chain offering 90K+ products with a mobile solution used by 500+ corporate clients.
Context
The customer is a leading European trading and manufacturing company that owns a B2B online retail chain offering more than 90K products across nearly 300 categories, from workwear to office and household items.
Initially, the customer sold products via their website based on SAP Commerce (previously SAP Hybris). When the website, along with its mobile version, was released in 2014, the customer didn’t regard mobile commerce as a viable sales channel. Eventually, the customer recognized the growing popularity of mobile devices for B2B transactions as well as their importance for seamless buying experience. As a result, the customer decided to develop a mobile app and optimize their website’s mobile version in line with the current mobile commerce standards.
They approached Itransition considering the successful results of our previous collaboration on a different project as well as our experience in mobile app development and SAP Commerce.
Solution
We developed a hybrid mobile app that incorporated native iOS and Android features while displaying the content through WebView. The app also featured several additional modules responsible for interaction between the backend of the customer’s website and integrated third-party services.
We equipped the developed solution with the following features:
- User registration and authorization
- Password recovery
- Product search
- A shopping cart
- Order management
- A payment system
- Access to purchase history
- One-click order repeat
- Push notifications about special offers, discounts, etc.
- Search for the nearest shop for in-store pick-up
Additionally, the app provided business users with the possibility to manage orders from several associated companies through a single user account.
The customer’s mobile app admins and marketers got access to valuable metrics for management and analytical purposes, such as:
- Active users during a specific period, including data about user type, age, and region
- App downloads and usage statistics
- New registered and authorized users
- Completed and abandoned orders
- Visits to specific pages
To ensure the user experience is cohesive across mobile touchpoints, our team also improved the mobile version of the customer’s online store:
- We leveraged the standard OAuth2 authentication to fix user authorization issues and allow authentication via tokens both in the mobile app’s native parts and WebView.
- We removed obsolete data that improved product discovery as well as sped up ordering. To do this, we applied CSS selectors to tag redundant elements with specified classes.
Our SAP Commerce and mobile development specialists also improved the backend part of the customer’s online store by customizing the API and SAP Commerce. We enhanced the homepage, admin panel, and product search to let the customer serve mobile app users more effectively.
Process
The customer’s team included a product owner, a business analyst, and key decision-makers.
Itransition’s team comprised a business analyst with a mobile development expertise, a project manager, mobile app and SAP Commerce solution architects, Android and iOS developers, as well as frontend and backend developers experienced in SAP Commerce.
The solution delivery was divided in several phases:
Core functionality of the mobile app
Based on the existing version of the SAP Commerce platform and its architecture, we developed the mobile app’s core features, including registration, authorization, product catalog search, order creation and payment, purchase history information, and more.
Analytics and push notifications
We added the functionality that allowed the customer to collect important data, such as the number of active users, completed/abandoned orders, new registrations, app downloads, etc. We also integrated the solution with FireBase to enable sending push notifications to the app users.
New features
Once the core functionality was delivered, our team continued enhancing the mobile app with new features on request. For example, we implemented a loyalty program management module and tools for managing marketing campaigns. Besides, we helped the customer publish their app on the App Store and Google Play.
Results
In 11 months, we delivered a fully functional mobile shopping app and enhanced performance of the online store’s mobile version. As a result of this cooperation, our customer got:
- A new effective sales channel that allowed users to quickly place orders and purchase on the go.
- The improved user experience of the mobile store version thanks to the enhanced SAP Commerce backend.
- A boosted marketing campaign coverage with the help of push notifications.
In the first three months after the solution’s launch, 500+ corporate clients downloaded the customer’s mobile app. Altogether, the share of mobile purchases in the customer’s turnover reached more than 10%.
