Rebuilding Jarir.com – the ERP and UX issues!
Jarir, a one-stop shop for office and school supplies, including Arabic/English books,Mobiles, Electronics and accessories , is one of the leading listed companies in Saudi Arabia. HQ in Riyadh, Jarir operates through two divisions – Retail and Wholesale – under the trademark of Jarir Bookstore.
Business Challenge:
Having recognized Ecommerce as the next avenue of growth for the company, Jarir Bookstore had built their web-store on Magento Enterprise Edition.
The Web-store was developed to achieve the following:
- To serve as a convenient channel for Jarir customers to shop online
- To make available complete information about the products’ availability in a specific (and nearby) store for in-store purchase
- Facilitate the download of the product catalogue flyers and more from the online store at any time.
- Facilitate the preordering of the merchandise of new releases.
However, the following hurdles confronted their ecommerce implementation efforts:
- ERP integration for cataloguing:As Jarir Bookstore has a centralized database for their entire catalog data, it was a very big challenge to manage and transfer the data to the webstore on a daily basis. Moreover the catalog size was huge and hence it took 3-4 days to transfer one set of data to the webstore.
This was a major back-end roadblock, preventing Jarir Bookstore from going ‘Live’! - Restricted catalog to sell online:As management policy, Jarir Bookstore includes only limited products available for online purchase. However, they wanted information about all their products and their availability in nearby stores to be put up on the webstore. Since, they did not plan for separate inventory for the webstore, implementing this was a challenge.
- Order Processing in ERP: As their warehouse operations, purchase, accounts, finance are managed through an ERP system, it was imperative for Jarir to have webstore orders stored in the ERP system.
- Web Store-front usability issues:Jarir bookstore website was developed in English and Arabic language. For Arabic version, they faced various browser support issues in displaying the content.
Moreover, the customer’s buying journey was not streamlined due to lack of a well-designed UI, Menu Options, Product Browsing and Check-out process, and did not have a mobile friendly layout.
Embitel Solutions:
- Our experienced Magento ecommerce development consultants conducted a series of collaborative workshops with business and technical managers from Jarir.
- These workshops helped our team to develop a detailed and in-depth understanding of Jarir’s business operations and internal processes.
- Embitel’s Solution Architecture restructured the Data import method, to ensure faster data transfers. This enabled a seamless transition from full-batch data import from ERP to incremental import.
- Subsequently the import time was reduced from 3-4 days to less than 2 hours.
- To help Jarir maintain a restricted catalogue, data has been maintained at the product level data maintained. This allows the Jarir team to easily include/exclude items from the catalogue by changing the selling status.
- Our team of highly skilled and experienced UX/UI designers and developers re-built the entire front-end with responsive theme for both English and Arabic versions of the website. This was done in collaboration with the Jarir marketing team to ensure that all the brand guidelines are met.
- Usability issues were resolved by implementing design best practices. This ensured that the customer shopping experience is highly optimized, well-defined and hence hassle-free.
- Built entire new flow for order processing to sync order data ERP. This helped to streamline the operations for the Fulfilment team.
- Implemented Solr search to deliver better on website search experience for visitors.
Embitel Impact:
- Reduced each ERP import time (for cataloguing and order-processing) from 3-4 days to 1-2 hours
- Resolved all web-site customer usability issues by re-designing UX and implementing a responsive theme for seamless experience even on hand-held devices.
You may also like to read about Jarir Case-study : Part – II (Going Omnichannel – consistent Jarir experience across channels).
