Sailor: How a POS integrated retail eCommerce presence helped create its identity as a top fashion brand

The Background

With the theme, Sailing through life, the RMG giant Epyllion Group launched its first retail venture, Sailor, a fashion & lifestyle brand, back in early 2015 to bring the latest fashion trends and high-quality outfits to Bangladesh market. The brand offers fashion and lifestyle items for everyone - men, women, and kids, with fashion wares ranging from trendy western fashion-wears to ethnic clothing. However, despite being backed by an RMG manufacturing giant, the brand lacked an online presence. nopStation helped build its first eCommerce platform in 2019, with POS integration. It allowed them to create an online presence and sustain the business during the Covid-19 situation in 2020-2021 when physical outlets were closed due to health restrictions. The eCommerce platform helped them increase the sales volume, build brand value, bring a whole new shopping experience for its loyal customers, and reach the new customer base who want to shop using the convenience of online shopping.

The Key Challenges

Even though Sailor is a fashion brand, backed by an RMG giant Epillyion Group, it lacked the eCommerce presence and a platform to justify its role as a new point-of-sales for the continuously growing online customer segment. Sailor's challenge was to, of course, start their online sales, but to also establish a strong digital identity and attract customers online. Before launching an eCommerce platform, all of their sales were done through the POS system in the physical outlets. Even when launching the individual eCommerce platform, the business had a dependency to integrate the existing POS system with the eCommerce platform to pull product, stock and discounts from the POS inventory to the eCommerce system. While the business needed customization and integration for fully automated back-office operation, it also required an intuitive UI for a smooth online shopping experience for the customers. The brand presented an intense development and build challenge of integrating the nopCommerce store with the legacy system, with dependency on developer support for the other system.

Our Solution

After careful analysis of Sailor's needs and goals, considering the amount of customization and integration effort, team nopStation came to a conclusion that the nopCommerce platform would be the best fit for the brand's eCommerce platform. The fashion brand understood that the purchasing trends were shifting increasingly to online platforms; they needed to compete more aggressively in the online retail fan space. So they agreed with our proposal to develop the eCommerce clothing store using the nopCommerce platform.

As the brand had an extensive product catalog and needed to sync system, we developed custom API endpoints on top of nopCommerce for them. This allowed the business to manage its regular back-office operations like managing discounts, updating product info, price and quantity in a single place, right into the POS system, while updating and displaying the same info on the nopCommerce storefront, automatically, without having to put too much admin effort. The admin user needed to upload quality images against the synced products in the nopCommerce admin end only. We integrated an AWS S3 plugin that helped the client offload the pressure of serving images from the server file system to the S3 buckets. For a rich search experience, we integrated Algolia hosted search service with the Sailor store. This helped the business to provide its customers with better product search results and secure a positive user experience. For the payment process, we integrated local Payment Aggegrator SSL Commerz and DBBL Payment Gateway. To make their fulfillment process fully automated, we developed an auto-order posting feature from the nopCommerce system to the POS system for the local orders that allowed posting order data automatically from the nopCommerce system to the POS system through API calls based on certain business logic. In contrast, for the international order fulfillment process, we integrated the DHL Shipping method with the eCommerce system.

With our team's efforts, including the efforts from our technical leads and cloud architects, we built an eCommerce solution that hosts around 20K SKUs, 8K indexed pages in Google Search Engine and handles 500 concurrent visitors per minute. The brand generates 10% of its total sales online today from no sales online. We provided proper consultation throughout our engagement that helped the brand to successfully create its identity to its online fanbase in Bangladesh.

The eCommerce Application features:

• Easy sign-up and login process
• Phone number as unique customer identifier besides email
• Advanced Product Search Engine integration with Algolia Hosted Search Engine
• Payment method flexibility, integration with DBBL and SSL commerce
• Shipping method flexibility, integration with DHL and local Shipping Providers
• Store locator for all outlets with Google Maps API integration
• Facebook Messenger, Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics integration

The Business Benefits

• Ensured seamless checkout journey for the customers
• From no sales online to 10% of total sales online in 2+ years
• Created brand value and digital identity
• Created a fresh & dedicated sales channel
• Helped the company keep its business running during the Covid-19 situation

nopStation is a Gold solution partner of nopCommerce and an eCommerce unit of Brain Station 23 Ltd., a top-ranking software development company of 600+ people, headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At nopStation, we design, build and enhance eCommerce solutions on top of the nopCommerce platform for clients of all business sizes. We help our customers build their business online by developing the right eCommerce solution using nopCommerce at a competitive price and reasonable timeline.