Website Awesomeness
Description
EC Kraus is a family owned business providing people with the supplies and products necessary for making wine and beer at home.
Primary Markets Served
North America
Challenges
EC Kraus was on an older eCommerce platform and lacked the customer segmentation and merchandising capabilities necessary to appeal to two very different customer audiences.
The frustration of hearing ‘no’ or ‘that would be custom work’ from their shopping cart provider is what led EC Kraus to Magento.
Overview
EC Kraus has been selling everything needed to make wine, beer and soda at home since 1966. Some of their customers have been shopping with them for 40 years. This family run business prides itself on providing personal service and their customers return year after year because of it.
Originally established as a catalog company, EC Kraus went online in 2002 with a simple shopping cart. Site speed, an inability to customize the site, and lack of customer segmentation capability prevented them from taking their business to the next level. In addition to these limitations, owner Ed Kraus recognized that by providing home brewing kits as well as home winemaking kits the company actually appealed to two very different audiences. If they were going to properly address their customers – and provide them with a satisfying online shopping experience – a new eCommerce system was necessary.
The Solution
The frustration of hearing “no” or “that would be custom work” from their shopping cart provider is what led EC Kraus to Magento. The idea of having an enterprise level platform while still enjoying the flexibility of open-source software made EC Kraus confident that Magento would be able to keep pace and evolve with their rapidly growing business.
EC Kraus turned to Magento Gold Solution partner, Groove Commerce, to help them implement a new, robust online store built with Magento Enterprise. Groove acknowledged EC Kraus’s success and utilized Magento capabilities that would provide significant new advantages for the company. Groove adopted an analytics-focused approach to the project in order to ensure that the features that were working were carried forward with Magento and, where necessary, new capabilities were implemented to accommodate their growth.
A few of the features Groove applied with Magento Enterprise include:
- Layered navigation for an all new “Wine Selector Tool,” allowing users to find a wine based on the attributes they select;
- Search criterion that makes it easy to find everything from the right wine testing equipment to a specialty grain for beer making;
- Full-page caching to increase overall site performance and decrease page load times;
Customers enjoy buying from EC Kraus because it’s an honest family business with a long standing reputation for excellence. It was critical that the new site provide a more modern shopping experience without losing the “soul” behind the business. Groove helped achieve this goal by maintaining the EC Kraus color scheme and providing user-friendly design features.
“We are very pleased with the way this project has turned out. With all the new features like better admin pages, cross-sell/up-sell, a smoother checkout process, and better management tools, our new site is a major leap from the old one,” said Kraus.
Groove integrated BizSyncXL Mail Order Manager Edition with Magento to give EC Kraus product synchronization capability, inventory updates and order status integration. In addition to the backend integration, Groove also installed and configured several extensions. These included a shipping override extension that creates the ability to set rules in CSV format, and an auto-add extension that allows EC Kraus to include a free item from their inventory with each order.
The main development challenge involved the need for a way to quickly place orders for multiple products without having to navigate all around the site to find the items. Groove built and installed a custom quick order form extension that presents all the products in a drop down format, where customers can easily select the items and add them to the cart with one click.
What theyre saying:
"When we first started shopping for a new website platform, we defined some goals. These included finding a platform that would not only be relevant today, but also eight or ten years from now. We didn't want to find ourselves shopping again in a year or two just to keep up with technology. It didn't take us long to realize that with its many powerful features, and the extensive Magento community, Magento met this goal,"
-Ed KrausDirecting Partner of EC Kraus