Gatineau

BEAUTY/COSMETICS
E-COMMERCE, ONLINE MARKETING

www.gatineau.co.uk

Fully responsive e-commerce EMS site for leading cosmetics brand

Background.

Gatineau combines natural ingredients with cutting-edge biotechnology to create an advanced range of skincare. Rooted in beauty therapy, the salon quality products have been developed alongside a range of beauty treatments and are used by skincare professionals worldwide. Specialising in anti-aging, the Gatineau products provide highly visible results for a younger looking you.

Goals.

The new e-commerce site needed to replace the existing site where Gatineau had been selling their products through a loosely branded site called The Beauty Room. The new site needed to convey the Gatineau brand as well as being a new home for their complete product range.
An integrated customer experience was very important; it was decided to integrate fully with their payment gateway to give the impression of a seamless payment process where the user is always on site.

The key targets of the site were:

• To allow users to filter the products easily as required 
• To create a seamlessly integrated customer shopping experience across all devices
• To allow office staff to continue to use existing back-office systems. 
• To offer discounts and deals such as voucher codes 
• To increase sales and customer base 
• To communicate with customers more effectively by using built-in marketing features such as email marketing and marketing automation.

Challenges.

The key challenges for this project were: 

• Integrating the payment gateway seamlessly within Kentico. This included handling 3D secure payments and passing all order information and payment statuses back into Kentico. 
• Creating a flexible product filter and the ability to link deep into filtered categories. 
• Replicating the current order report that is uploaded into the back office system. 
• Creating a fully responsive shopping cart experience. 

Solution.

• The client had chosen SagePay as their preferred payment gateway. It was decided that the best approach was to develop a fully integrated gateway to use within Kentico. The developed solution enables the user to stay on-site and allows the processing of payments and the passing of order statuses between the systems. The solution also supports 3D secure. 
• To create a product filter, Smart Search Filter was used. The product grid was displayed using the Smart search results web part. Initially, the default functionality of the filter was used, but the post back caused problems with the user being able to use the back button. As query string based filters are supported, the categories were converted into query string values, and a JavaScript function was written to process it all. The result is a dynamic filter where the user can navigate back through their selections. 
• The client wanted to keep using their existing back-office system. To ensure the new site integrated with it a custom order report had to be developed that matched the requirements of the fulfillment system. It was achieved by using the standard reporting functionality of Kentico but extended by using a custom widget in the report layout. The widget enabled much more control over how the data was manipulated and then displayed. 
• The shopping experience including the payment gateway had to be fully responsive and seamless. The focus was on the mobile user experience, and the forms were simplified to help users navigate more easily
  
  Part of the marketing strategy was to leverage the Online Marketing features of Kentico. This was done by: 
• Developing a dynamic email template that used the advanced CMS capabilities to make managing the email content as easy as editing the site content. The roadmap for this feature is to introduce more dynamic sections to the email, such as best sellers, latest blog posts, and new products. By using the dynamic email functionality, there is very little content editing the administrator needs to do between email broadcasts. 
• Creating Scores to determine in which category of products a user was most interested. The products in these sections were given a rule with a recurring value. This enabled the personalization of certain sections of the site to promote certain products depending on which category the user is most interested in. 
• The roadmap for this site includes defining personas, using marketing automation to send trigger emails to users who abandon their cart, and expanding the personalization functionality to modify the initial product feed.