Transforming from a B2B company to a B2C-oriented one can be difficult. This requires not only changing the main conception of the organisation on the ideological level but also forces the adoption of new technologies – such as for example Sylius. Only the best of the best can easily convert to a new way of thinking. And Polyphoto have proved that they are definitely the Italian market leader.
Polyphoto is an official Italian distributor of prestigious brands that made the history of photography like Kodak, Polaroid, Olympus, and Tamron. Sixty years after its creation, the company has taken an important repositioning path on the national market combining distribution activities with the online sales of products in complete synergy with the retail.
The company was present online with a corporate website with no useful functionality to encourage the business and suffered from a total absence of a real Digital Strategy. Our amazing Partners, Webgriffe, supported the organization in the first step of the Digital Strategy definition thanks to a two-day workshop with the managers, analyzing the Business Model and Value Proposition. Afterwards, they stepped into the design of the operational solutions, in order to bring the biggest possible value in the company’s online presence, maintain an adequate level of communication and develop the technology platform and the system integration.
The aim of the whole project was to create a smart platform able to improve the synergy between eCommerce and traditional retail and also to offer a further service to those consumers who were looking for products difficult to find in store. This double core was certainly the most challenging element of the project.
« We identified Sylius as the most suitable platform to combine the standard cart needs with the most particular ones related to merchants’ customized functionalities.:
The ability to customize some of the flows supporting the planned strategy, allowed Polyphoto to go online with the new project with more than 20% savings on the estimated budget. Thanks to the scalability offered by Sylius, it was easy to interface the platform via API with third-party services (SaaS) for advanced content management (Contentful) and product data management via PIM (Akeneo). Polyphoto immediately noticed a notable increase in the website loading speed with a consequent increase in the users’ average time spent on the site.
« The perfect adjective for the Sylius approach in the development of a high performing online store is undoubtedly “flexibility”. An all-inclusive ‘one tool for everything’ approach is inadequate and limiting for what concerns productivity and performance. »
The essentiality of the Sylius function blocks allows a solid foundation on which it’s possible to integrate tools, modules and ad-hoc services that excellently respond to specific tasks. Sylius provides a high performing and easily maintainable core to be customized according to the specific needs of the sales project and customer requests. Thanks to Sylius platform’s daily workflow development is clear, linear and frictionless.
The synergy between the direct online sales channel and the retail one took shape into the definition of adequate pricing policy and the realization of a useful tool also for the retailers on the Italian territory. Thanks to the new website, retailers can now order on behalf of their clients deciding to send the bought products to their store or to the client’s address with no necessity to complete the transaction thanks to the agreements between the parties. On the other hand, clients can buy online and request a pickup in the nearest store, ensuring an increase in business for all parties involved.
