Bobi (Serbia)

Client - Bobi jewelry 

Bobi, jewelry founded in 1997, has continual since opening. In order to create a business impact on the web and further secure their expansion, the jewelry hired Essential Dots to create an eCommerce solution.

Summary

In order to give its clients comprehensive overview of the products, Bobi, one of the fastest growing Serbian jewelries, requested eCommerce website without compromises. They wanted to provide their clients with an exceptional experience during the checkout process. They also wanted to present their company without the standard content editing limitations of most eCommerce solutions. The perfect “marriage” between TYPO3 and Magento was the way to go.

TYPO3 does not have high-quality eCommerce solution out-of-the-box. There are few TYPO3 extensions on TER (TYPO3 online repository of free extensions) which allow easy setting of a small online shop, but they all lack features and maturity in comparison to the best eCommerce applications. The same actually applies to all open source enterprise level web content management (WCM) systems available on the market. That’s why interoperability of a WCM is becoming more and more important today. There is simply no application that can do everything right.

Magento eCommerce application

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog- management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

Challenge

What seemed like an obvious choice, using TYPO3 and Magento together, had one big risk encompassed - double administration and content editing with increase of operating costs. Also, the maintainability and upgradeability of both systems had to be intact. Essential Dots was entrusted with the implementation of this highly coupled system.

Solution

Essential Dots developed custom TYPO3 and Magento add-ons, allowing seamless integration of these two systems:

  • Registered front-end users are able to access TYPO3 website protected pages, as well as Magento shopping cart without going to an external shop
  • Single sign-on for the editors was implemented allowing easy switching between TYPO3 and Magento administration back-end applications (*)
  • Custom smart URL add-on was implemented on top of TYPO3’s realurl extension in order to improve search engine optimization (SEO) on category listing and single product pages (*)
  • Links to category listing or single product view could be created directly from TYPO3 rich text editor (RTE) or through standard TYPO3 link fields (*)
  • Special caching scheme was implemented on top of TYPO3 caching to allow fast execution of the system (*)
  • Newsletters editing was completely implemented within TYPO3, allowing its superb content editing features in comparison to Magento (*)
  • Newsletter sending is performed completely by TYPO3 using the Magento users database (*)

(*) Essential Dots custom development

Benefits 

  • The website visitor is unaware of 2 systems driving the website
  • TYPO3 and Magento open-source systems are seamlessly used together in order to get the best of breed features from both

Conclusion

While this website is a bright example of integrating TYPO3 and Magento, it also shows that TYPO3 can be seamlessly integrated with any 3rd party system which is one of the main enterprise requirements today. TYPO3 can be integrated the same way with any eCommerce application, customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Furthermore, Essential Dots has once again proven its competence in developing outstanding TYPO3 powered websites.

Go to bobinakit.com