Magento + CSY Vector integration
Somayas Kitchen are an online grocer for Indian, Asian & world foods delivering all over Europe. They serve both the wholesale and retail sectors and wanted to scale.
The Challenge
Somayas Kitchen was already a successful retail and wholesale business, and wanted to expand by creating a new online brand, which would enable them to sell their extensive range of products online. Compared to their competitors, Somayas Kitchen had an existing advantage in that their range of products in stock was much larger and could offer a one-stop-shop experience.
They had 15,000 products that needed to be showcased, with hundreds of products changing every few weeks. In order to support the scaling, they needed their Magento eCommerce website to be integrated with their CSY Vector Point of Sale system to sync products, inventory, orders and customers.
On the admin side, the website needed order management with the admins being able to print out picking lists for multiple orders for efficiency. The performance of this website had to be excellent, especially so for an online store of this magnitude.
Customers needed to be able to view and reorder their previous orders, as well as be able to favourite products to be viewed later. The website needed to integrate loyalty points for customers, and there needed to be an easy way to share recipes that linked to products so that customers could easily add items to their cart directly from the recipe. They also needed to be able to add products to their cart from any page, eliminating the need to go to each product page to add it.
The Solution
Website
We designed and built a blazing fast website developed on the Magento platform that utilises Full Page Caching, Query Caching and Browser Caching.
The new website has a fully featured admin dashboard, enabling admins to see reports on top customer, best selling products and more. This dashboard allows for easy order management (including returns), recording of expiry dates for products in the order, and easy printing of picking lists for multiple orders to that their staff only have to go around the store once to pick up items for open orders.
Somayas Kitchen’s customers can easily add products to the cart from any page, and the checkout process is now easier as the website remembers which items have been added to the cart, so they can continue shopping on another device as is convenient to them; the cart is loaded as soon as they log in. Customers now have full account management. They can set multiple delivery addresses, view all their orders and order progress, reorder previous orders, earn and view their loyalty points, and favourite products.
Somayas Kitchen’s admins are able to create recipes, and link to the products and relevant quantities on the website, and customers are able to see this and add selected products to their carts. By doing so, Somayas Kitchen is able to fully live up to its mission, which states that cooking should be an adventure, and exotic ingredients easy to find!
Integration
We built an integration between the CSY Vector Point of Sale platform and their Magento website to allow them to keep all their products, inventory, orders and customers in sync.
Whenever a product is created/edited/deleted on Vector, the relevant product on Magento gets updated. Whenever the inventory level for a product changes on Vector, it is pushed through to the website too. This website also links to eBay so when we push the inventory change to Magento, it then pushes through to eBay too keeping everything in sync.
We also monitor the orders on Magento and as soon as a magento order is received, we process the data and send it to Vector so all inventory levels can stay in sync. eBay orders are pulled through into Magento and they in turn are sent to Vector by our integration. This also means that all sales data is available in Vector.
This integration has saved a lot of time and given our client peace of mind that they have a robust integration in place so that they can concentrate on scaling their business.