Journey to an efficient B2B e-commerce system for Lynka

Brand story

Lynka is a leading supplier of corporate apparel, promotional clothing and sportswear in Europe.

The company produces and distributes a wide range of assortments, offering B2B customers the opportunity to customize their products by adding individual designs. The brand has been well recognized on the market for the last 25 years.

B2B e-commerce journey

Before switching to Magento Platform Lynka team was facing number of challenges on day to day basis. Customer experience when placing an order was often too complicated to finish the process. Significant loss of sale was caused indirectly by:

• Orders placed online followed by time-consuming email conversations.
• Orders often placed via phone or email where the team members manually type data into the system.
• Large numbers of price queries.

Product Price List

The Lynka store offers a range of around 170,000 products. Large choice of products/product options can only be beneficial and help with approaching new customers. Majority of these products can be personalized by adding individual designs. Customers can also choose from several types of printing techniques therefore one single product could even have as many as 90,000 price combinations. It almost feels like price-lists for Lynka B2B customer is created individually. Lynka Team values its independence with availability to make price list amendments. With Magento Platform, there is no need to seek for help every time the price amendment is required.

Price determination factors:

• Product cost (base product)
• Techniques used and time involved in customisation process
• Quantity ordered
• Packaging
• Transport

Challenges

• B2B customer experience
• Time-consuming additional activities needed to finalise the project
• System efficiency for B2B orders
• Individual orders costings

Microservices as an ideal solution

Amount of data to process and large variation of orders from B2B customers challenged Lynka efficiency of the service. We have decided to separate applications and create microservices – perfect solution for large retailers.

The advantages of microservices

System load

Efficient System productivity is achieved by arranging an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. This allows us to avoid loading entire data when only part of the application is being used.

Better scalability

Split up into smaller and simpler components, a microservice application is easier to understand and manage. Our business partners can concentrate on a specific service that is related to a business goal they have. Each element can be scaled independently.

Security

The benefits of microservices don’t just extend to development speed and scalability. They also make things a lot better for application security. In case of any failure of one of the elements Strix can find individual solution without interfering with the whole system.

Final product selling price

The solution used for this customer allows calculating product final selling price in real-time. Algorithms used are created on the Symfony framework where base product price is being amended during personalization process. There are various personalisation options to choose from e.g. print, font, quantity etc. Final selling price is then being sent to Magento which allows the end customer to see it immediately.

ERP integration

In order to run the personalisation process as straightforward as possible, we have integrated an internal ERP system with Magento Platform. This allows to export base products from ERP to Magento, customise and send them back to ERP to allow your team to finish final production and dispatch process.

Product information management

Strix knows how important for our customers is to have a reliable stock control system. It is compulsory to update warehouse stock on day-to-day basis. Offering 170,000 products can often cause issues with system overload. For Lynka we have used Ergonode – an e-commerce managing product information tool. It turned out to be an ideal solution for our customer. Ergonode allows changing only products which require refreshing without need to run the update on entire stock

Our goal was to provide the best-in-class customer experience for our B2B clients and streamline the order process to ensure stability, safety, and speed of service loading. Thanks to our new Magento platform and the customization done by our implementation partner Strix, we achieved each of our objectives. Great job Strix! - John Lynch, CEO Lynka

Implemented solutions

• Magento 2.3 - the latest version of the B2B e-commerce system, which provides stability, security and adaptation to modern market requirements.
• Price server - real-time price calculation implemented by the application allows to improve B2B customers experience.
• UX design - the design simplifies the B2B ordering personalisation process and allows to improve customers experience‍
• ERP integration - Magento Platform integration with internal ERP systems helps to improve team productivity across the project.