International fair living store with natural products

Berlin-based home & living brand URBANARA sells quality interior accessories that are produced with care for people and the environment. Through their online stores they supply clients in a.o. Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Great Britain with gorgeous home decoration items, all made from natural materials.

CLIENT

URBANARA

INDUSTRY

Lifestyle, Home

TECHNOLOGY

Shopify plus webshops

PACKAGE

Webshop migration

Services we provided

Migration

Store Development

E-Commerce Optimization

UX/UI Design

Internationalization

Streamlining your business? It starts with your platform

When URBANARA knocked on our door they were at their wits’ end. About two years ago it had become clear to them they were caught in a classic software lock-in: their former monolithic platform had been so heavily customized that they couldn’t touch anything without breaking something elsewhere in the system.

At first they decided to make a serious attempt at building their own custom platform. Soon enough that turned out to be a complex undertaking, and the initial ambitions had to be watered down several times. By the May 2018 deadline their in-house platform was again far from ready to be released. That’s when URBANARA decided to let go of the project for good.

At that point URBANARA started looking for an existing platform that could meet their requirements, and an agency that could help them launch in 8 to 12 weeks. Shopify Plus was the right match, mainly because of the many options for additional functionality offered by the Shopify appstore. A European agency with an extensive portfolio and the necessary know-how was easily found as well: Code caught their attention because we have shown our capacity for delivering high quality visual design, and because some complex backend programming was required.

After that, things were moving fast. Early July we launched the test site urbanara.at, and when that turned out to function well we quickly followed with urbanara.de and urbanara.ch. At the moment we are busy getting urbanara.co.uk ready, and further refining the connector with the German fulfilment giant Ingram Micro.

The new sites are performing beautifully! The mobile versions in particular are converting like a charm, which enables URBANARA to make a big leap forward with their social media marketing. What’s more, all the custom functionality developed by our backenders is saving them an enormous amount of time. All kinds of recurrent manual chores are now fully automated.

We hear that this is a big relief for the employees. Finally there is time for the really interesting tasks! Feedback like this always pleases us to no end, of course. Enjoy, guys!

Want to know more? We also wrote a blog about the URBANARA project.

The split order function

URBANARA ’s range of products is quite diverse. Hence it often happens that customers order a combination of, say, a big lamp and a small pillow. You don’t put those together in a single package, obviously. It gets even more complicated when that lamp can only be delivered in a few weeks’ time, and when it has to be shipped from a different warehouse, by a different carrier than the pillow.

How do you ensure that all this is split correctly and processed in the right way? A nice, challenging puzzle for our backenders, when they were putting together the connector with URBANARA ’s big German fulfilment partner Ingram Micro. Wonderful to see how smoothly all this functionality is running now! Didn’t we just fix that nicely :)