Shan Foods Spices Up The US Market With Magento & WordPress Online Store

USA, February 23, 2015 (Newswire.com) -
The Need For WordPress & Magento

Although Magento is one of the leading ecommerce frameworks, it has a fairly poor CMS and its limited fields prevent full customisable product and page templates.  It’s also a resource hog, requiring massive memory and processing resources and building simple web pages on this platform are akin to using a tank for a drive to town. A change request to alter the websites appearance takes too much time and while it’s perfectly possible to blog within Magento using add-ons like Blog extensions, there are advantages to integrating a platform that has been built with content publication in mind. It’s also possible to turn WordPress into a eCommerce store, but Magento offers levels of flexibility and functionality and security that it’s difficult to replicate on a platform designed for content management.

"We are passionate about delivering digital products for our clients that make a measurable difference. The launch of the new integrated ecommerce environment for the brand will not only align its marketing but also provide a platform that will support future growth across the board."

Umair Mohsin, Director Digital

Also as Google becomes more sophisticated and social media especially reviews becomes a dominant source of referrals, it’s important that eCommerce retailers get on board with content publishing if they’re to attract new customers and retain existing buyers. It can however also be difficult to publish audience-attracting content on an eCommerce store like Magento. Product descriptions are essential but they aren’t the sort of content that will attract a loyal readership.

Thus if a retailer wants to maximize both the effectiveness of their content publishing efforts and the efficiency of their sales process, an integration that makes use of both WordPress and Magento is the optimal solution.

The MI Digital Solution

As consumers continue to demand compelling experiences with brands, retailers are challenged with finding partners that can create rich, differentiated online experiences for their consumers while driving growth.

Shan Foods turned to Magento Community Edition because it is the only commerce platform that is designed from the ground up to be configured, extended and customized to meet each merchant’s requirements, providing virtually unlimited flexibility to create unique brand experiences that delight consumers and also convert and increase sales. It also provides integrated tools into platforms such as Ebay and Amazon as well as integrating advanced analytics tools such as RJ Metrics for Cohort Analysis and Life-Time-Value analysis.

Dedicated Food Brand Store – An Industry-First

Marrying content with commerce is reason for fanfare as conversion increases. As content moves closer to the consumer, deft brands are lubricating the purchase funnel and reducing dependency on traditional media partners. New direct-to-consumer, owned platforms (branded URLs, social channels, etc.) offer a chance to stray from traditional formats and present and deliver content that offers relevance and resonance vs. reach and frequency.

The ability to weave together content and commerce may be what separates retail winners from losers. 78 percent of consumers now report engaging in “webrooming,” or purchasing a product in-store after browsing online and brands are sensing the opportunity to secure the sale before the consumer enters a traditional retail format’. Brands now need to weave digital content & commerce together in a seamless customer experience to drive sales online and even in-store. Shan Foods which is the leader in ethnic foods category, stands as one of the most reputed food companies and a powerful global brand with presence in more than 65 countries across 5 continents understood this when it chose MI Digital as its digital agency to help power this phase of digital online presence.

As an innovative food brand, they wanted to expand their formidable presence which ranges from Amazon in US to Zooom Stores in Dubai and Tesco, Waitrose and everything in between to the online medium and tasked MI Digital to provide an integrated set of tools and processes to power Shan’s omni-channel strategy, reduce operational and integration complexity, and enable the marketing team to create consistent brand experiences across channels.

One example of an area where food brands find themselves challenged to keep up with rapid changes in consumer behavior is in the delivery of compelling experiences across devices. “With Magento, we were able to optimize the customer experience for consumers on desktops, tablets and mobile in time, even as new devices enter the market,” said Zeek, chief technology officer at MI Digital. Amongst other challenges, Shan Foods also wanted to create a customized user experiences for each brand yet maintain common core processes and integration across all brands. They also wanted full in-house control over merchandising promotions, catalog, pricing and all other aspects of the online shopping experience to easily customize sites by region or product line.

MI Digital was also required to develop a responsive web design which allowed content creation once and have it automatically adapt to the format of specific mobile or tablet devices. This feature was important to quickly deploy mobile and tablet applications with confidence, knowing that the product, promotion, account and brand experience will be consistent across every consumer interaction.

Shan Foods also wanted to give their customers “buy anywhere, receive anywhere” convenience by providing accurate inventory availability across channels. Real-time inventory visibility across multiple locations, including stores, is key to enabling the buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere experience. This feature when implemented has already helped Shan reduce excess inventory, capture lost sales and promote the most profitable products to their customers.

Understanding Shan’s markets and requirements, MI Digital also offered an integrated master and subsequent catalog structures which allowed the team to easily share products across categories, catalogs and sites and manage and maintain seasonal, branded and future catalogs simultaneously, putting an end to inconsistent information across channels. This ensured delivery of highly branded, personalized and consistent content across channels, and helped customers make smarter buying decisions.

“We could use a web interface to efficiently select which attributes or actions we wanted to display across brand experiences or we could apply granular control to tailor Shan’s customers’ experiences to each specific brand. For example, we could easily share and replicate promotions, manage multiple optimization tests and even share customer records across sites. We could also publish product content and catalogs across multiple brands with speed and accuracy using a simple web interface and process flow. With integrated master and subsequent catalog structures, you can share products across categories, catalogs and sites, while simultaneously managing and maintaining seasonal, branded and future catalogs”, said Zeek.

Taking advantage of order fulfillment services that go beyond the normal pick, pack and ship operational process, we consulted and then implemented solutions that ensured that when the customer received their purchase, the experience delivered the full brand identity from specialized packaging to gift wrapping, to ease of returns.

“Our impressive roster of new client wins and our innovative integration practices demonstrate our momentum in this category. We will continue to find new ways to tap into the power of our open source ecosystem and make it easier than ever for brands to continue to deliver fresh, new consumer experiences. The industry can expect us to launch more tools that simplify the merchandising process further to optimize product category pages and boost sales soon,” said Umair Mohsin, Director Digital.
 

About MI Digital – Global Digital Marketing Services:

Based in 5 countries of the world with offices in USA, UK, UAE, Australia, Thailand and Pakistan, MI Digital is a leading ecommerce, advertising and digital marketing solutions agency. MI Digital creates solutions with high sales conversion through elegant technology while promoting the branded experience across all digital channels.

With industry expertise of over 10 years working on global brands such as Nestle, Domino's, Toyota, Pfizer, etc coupled with the Magento ecommerce technology produces more sales from digital channels.

MI Digital promises real-world insights to create work that makes a difference—and makes a measurable impact. 

About Magento:

Magento serves more than 240,000 merchants worldwide and was recognized as the leading ecommerce platform for fast growing retailers in the 2014 Internet Retailer 500. Magento also powers 26 percent of all ecommerce sites in the Alexa one million sites list; more than any other ecommerce platform.