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The Puccini brand was founded in 1996 and carries a tradition of making fashion-forward travel luggage, handbags and leather goods. Before cooperating with Polcode, their web store needed a serious upgrade to keep up with the competition. They also wanted to grow sales abroad, and needed a modern platform that could handle the jump from selling in regional markets to global online order shipping.

In recent years, Polcode has served as Puccini’s professional developer team, transforming their online presence with modern technologies that enable intuitive global ordering systems and increased sales & conversions—all within a visually appealing shopping interface.

As with every project with Polcode, there are two primary objectives: providing technical excellence, as well as soft-skills like efficient communication that make the project run smoothly. Strong collaboration practices always result in a better end-product. 

“It was not a coincidence that we chose Polcode as our technology partner. We were looking for a reliable, timely and trusted e-commerce development firm who would take over the maintenance and development of our online store. Their reputation among our friends from the IT industry led us to work with them.

We rank Polcode’s work very highly, and ultimately chose to continue working with them over the last three years.”

— Jacek Przybył, IT Development Expert at Puccini

How we helped renew a retail brand’s online presence

The Puccini brand has an extensive catalog of products, containing several hundred models of products available in various colors and size variants. They operate twenty-three retail locations across Poland, and opened their first ecommerce store at the beginning of 2008. 

From the outset, our goal of renewing their online store was to update everything from the visual layer, customer ordering experience, as well as give Puccini the tools they needed to meet growing online demands. We wanted them to be able to:

• Sell and fulfill with ease from their warehouse
• Handle shipping abroad with as little customer friction as possible 
• Create a full-range product catalog 
• Manage modern photo galleries powered by a content management system
• Automate marketing features
• Integrate social media within the store itself

On top of new features, it was important for Puccini’s technical team to work with Polcode in an agile way. Their professional teams were able to fully control the development process at Polcode, which included consistent daily reporting, setting task priorities and frequent consultations with our ecommerce specialists.

Bringing Puccini.pl into the new era of ecommerce

Our work on the Puccini online store was taken over from their previous developers, who weren’t transforming their digital brand as they had hoped. Today’s customer expectations in online shopping are very similar across all markets—safety, trust, user experience, convenience and ease of use. Here’s how we achieved just some of those ideals.

Upgrading servers

To begin, we needed to improve server efficiency before any other tasks were prioritized. This would be the baseline requirement from which all other features stemmed—a high-performance website with fast page load speeds, and adaptability to future changes.

Rethinking business logic

We helped update the ecommerce website’s Business Logic, which describes a sequence of events that happen, for instance, during checkout. For example, clicking the checkout button, entering a shipping address, billing address, payment method, and finally, confirmation processes. This stage is where the true nuance of a website’s software development comes into play—many things can go wrong here, as multiple systems come together at this point, such as: HTML code, content management, logistics, personal data-handling, error-handling, network connections, payments handling, localized compliance regulations, and so on.

Smashing bugs

Our investigation process of the old Puccini website showed us more than just an outdated server setup and performance metrics. There were bugs in the system which could completely derail a customer’s ordering experience.

Bringing in modules

The great thing about developing for Magento is that many features don’t need to be built from scratch. Our experts recommended certain modules for specific features, and then customized each one to fit Puccini’s needs. Out-of-the-box ecommerce modules significantly reduce the time and cost it takes to develop features from scratch.

A Better Checkout Experience

The checkout experience is often regarded as the most important priority for an online store. It must be fast, accurate, secure and above all, feel seamless and easy to the shopper. Puccini now has a lightning-fast checkout time, quickly moving users from one stage to the next. 

Introducing Marketing & Analytics

We introduced many features from the Magento toolkit including SEO, Google Analytics and Google Tag Management. We also implemented new Marketing Automation features via Edrone, a powerful customer intelligence solution as well as SellAction and Admitad (affiliate marketing).

Language Versions

All changes were introduced in both the Polish and Ukrainian versions. There were a few eastern market specific exceptions only for the ukr version.

Logistics and Shipping

The most formidable project was handling and building Puccini’s shipment modules. For each fulfillment company, we developed a custom integration with companies like InPost parcel lockers (Paczkomaty Inpost)—locker-style pickup locations. This included local pickup stores like Paczka w RUCHu and DPD Pickup. Some of them required the use of OpenStreetMap API which allowed us to integrate product deliveries with real-time maps.

“Communication and code quality with Polcode has always been impeccable. Our meetings are informative and lightning-efficient and deliverables always come on time. Polcode went above and beyond; they did not simply implement our ideas without input, but offered ways to do things better, smarter, or at lower cost.”

— Jacek Przybył, IT Development Expert at Puccini