Golden Apple uses PimCore for product catalog management

Golden Apple is one of the most successful cosmetics and perfumery retailers on the Russian market today, actively expanding its presence: the company opens its first store outside Russia and actively develops its online direction. One of the distinctive features is the unique assortment: the company actively cooperates with the exclusive brands, providing customers with space for choice. Constantly growing nomenclature diversity led to the fact that the current custom accounting system could no longer cope with the new challenges of business: the lack of systematic processes for working with large amounts of data created difficulties and was time consuming. Due to the active launch and development of e-commerce, the need arose to automate the processes of working with the catalog. Such a solution would allow partners to upload new items independently, and managers to freely manage the large incoming data flow.

• Selecting effective tool for maximum coverage of the need

• Finalizing integration with external systems

• Implementing digital content management system – Training Golden Apple personnel to work with the new solution

Pimcore solution of PIM class was chosen as the main tool. Product Information Management is a tool for managing a large amount of product data. All important information about each item in the catalog is collected in a single digital space. The Pimcore solution had a number of advantageous advantages: - Free system: the pricing policy allows for free access to all important features, which helps save on software purchases,

• Open source code: free access to the source code allows for easy adaptation of the product to your own needs,

• Support and training: regular updates and active support of the community gives insight into product development and new opportunities for improvements,

• Minimum development requirements: the solution requires only knowledge of php (the ease of selecting the team gives the client the ability to maintain the product by themselves),

• Variety of tools for optimal adjustment: many tasks can be easily solved by the manager himself within the interface without the involvement of programmers.

Expertise in working with the solution and a wealth of international implementation experience served as an additional advantage in favor of Pimcore.

Challenge Accepted: hundreds of thousands of products and only one solution

A major challenge was defined at the start of the project: the process of adding and populating products for a new business unit - e-commerce sales - had to be implemented from scratch. As part of this ambitious goal, the project team faced some technical challenges:

• Defining product hierarchies and attributes for further filtering and display on the site. How the problem was solved: In order to make the system intuitive and easy to use, the project team together with the customer organized brainstorming sessions where the customer portrait was defined, references were collected and the understanding of the website audience was formed. This data became the basis for designing the UX interface.

• Filling the system with primary data (goods updates): It was necessary to add over 100,000 product items in a single database within a short period of time. How the problem was solved: automatic tools for mass data creation, editing and reconciliation were finalized. In order to quickly fill in the product catalog Odyssey experts used additional tools for uploading and downloading data on product items in Excel.

• Integration with External Sources. The main problem in this situation is the correctness of the information exported to the online store and the speed of data exchange. How we solved the problem: separated data export and import into independent streams - it helped to ensure a stable data transfer rate at all stages.

Active participation and help from Golden Apple experts helped to achieve all the goals set for the record time: the rapid implementation of the system for 3 months says about the successful choice of the tool and productive work on both sides. At the moment the system contains more than a hundred thousand items, offering Golden Apple customers the best assortment and convenient online service for a pleasant virtual shopping.