Flex­i­bil­i­ty as a service

The chal­lenge

Sekon­ic approached our agency look­ing for a major move from a clunky, expen­sive and hard to main­tain plat­form into a more mod­ern set­up. Our team pulled an out­stand­ing major move to Big­Com­merce, push­ing the plat­for­m’s capa­bil­i­ties to the edge in order to pre­serve infor­ma­tion while max­i­miz­ing the shop­ping experience.

The Approach

Glob­al, inte­grat­ed and custom-made

We devel­oped two web­sites for Sekon­ic; one for the US mar­ket, and anoth­er for their glob­al audi­ence. Big­Com­merce’s flex­i­bil­i­ty gave us the right tools to focus on the end cus­tomer for the for­mer, and on brand aware­ness and dis­trib­u­tor infor­ma­tion for the latter.

Through a cre­ative use of import­ed CSV files and cus­tomized scripts and lay­outs, we gave Sekon­ic sim­ple ways to update com­plex data sets. Inter­na­tion­al dis­trib­u­tor infor­ma­tion, ser­vice, repairs or returns are easy to browse per coun­try, and most impor­tant­ly, easy to main­tain for con­tent managers.

Data-first but design-driven

Our clien­t’s design team gave us a full style guide and a core design for key pages. Our job was to bring it to life, and extend it to addi­tion­al cus­tomiza­tions including:

• Ad-hoc prod­uct com­par­i­son tool.
• Cus­tom, enriched prod­uct lay­out designs via Zmags.
• Cus­tom blog structure.

An exten­sive use of Metafields, one of Big­Com­merce’s hid­den gems, gave us the super­pow­er to dynam­i­cal­ly sync data from the prod­uct inven­to­ry man­ag­er direct­ly into item pages, including:

• PDF down­loads.
• Soft­ware and Firmware updates.
• Mul­ti­ple cus­tom specs and rich infor­ma­tion beyond sim­ple cus­tom fields.
• “What’s in the box” descriptions.
• And a spe­cif­ic cus­tomiza­tion for vari­ant struc­ture and relat­ed products.

Out­stand­ing War­ran­ty platform

We devel­oped a cus­tom war­ran­ty plat­form from scratch using CraftCMS. Tight­ly and seam­less­ly inte­grat­ed into Big­Com­merce and Sal­si­fy, the plat­form works as a glob­al cus­tomer cen­ter, includ­ing a top of the line mul­ti-lan­guage inte­gra­tion for Eng­lish and Japan­ese-speak­ing audiences.

By keep­ing the PIM as the one source of data truth, our API-dri­ven plat­form allows cus­tomers to eas­i­ly search the prod­ucts by name or SKU, remov­ing data dis­crep­an­cies and giv­ing both the client and the com­pa­ny’s sup­port teams easy and clear ways to ask for sup­port and war­ran­ty when needed.