A powerfull e-commerce platform voor all Favorite Gifts brands

Reinforcing client relationships with the perfect gift

So, you want to find the perfect promotional gift to thank your clients properly. Or you’re looking for that one goodie to make your brand stand out at the next business fair. Favorite Gifts will help you achieve those goals. The business has four brands with their own focus and customer segments. Favorite Gifts offers a large range of high-quality and customised promotional gifts using those four brands. But how do you provide visitors with a quick and user-friendly order flow when you’re dealing with such a vast and customisable product range? And how do you develop that for the online shops of each of the four brands in a cost- and time-efficient way? That’s what Favorite Gifts was wondering when it came to us. The business wanted to switch from a Drupal platform to a dedicated e-commerce platform to refresh all of its online shops.

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Challenge

Find, personalise and order the perfect promotional gift in as few clicks as possible.

Solution

A powerful, flexible and scalable Adobe Commerce e-commerce platform for every brand with a seamless UX and a user-friendly order process.

About Favorite Gifts

Favorite Gifts has been offering high-quality and customisable promotional products globally for over 50 years. The business believes that the right promotional gift will help build strong business relationships and reinforce brands. Favorite Gifts has four brands, each with its own focus and customer segment. The brands Van Helden, Van Heijster and Eurogifts operate in the Benelux and sell promotional gifts to organisations. The brand Giving Europe is an international wholesaler targeted towards organisations that want to sell promotional gifts themselves.

A close collaboration built on mutual trust

Our goal was clear: develop new online shops for all the Favorite Gifts brands with seamless user experiences and user-friendly order processes. Only then would we be able to allow visitors to find, customise and order the perfect promotional gift. That may seem obvious, but with such a complicated product structure, so many customisation options and the price calculation that comes with those two things, this was no small feat.

In a series of brainstorming sessions with Favorite Gifts, we defined a platform strategy and created a plan for a seamless implementation. We decided to first develop the online shops for Van Helden, Van Heijster and Eurogifts. These online shops all sell promotional gifts straight to organisations, which means we could develop the online shops in similar ways.

With our blended team, we got to work. Our team consisted of PHP, Java and front-end developers, UX researchers and designers, a project manager and a product owner. Our foundation for success? A close collaboration built on mutual trust.

A powerful, custom e-commerce platform with a seamless user experience

To realise our ambition on a technical level, we developed a single custom e-commerce platform to serve as the foundation for all the online shops. To support the platform, we relied on the advanced Adobe Commerce and then expanded the platform with other tools and techniques to make the online shops even more powerful. Here are some examples:

All the online shops have a quick performance and got a 100% SEO score in Google Lighthouse because we built the front end with Hyvä Themes.
Product and order data are linked thanks to the data integration platform Apache Camel.
Products can be personalised easily with the product configurator because we built it with web components.

Still, all the online shops have one seamless UX because we built them on a foundation of a modern micro front-end architecture.

“After an extensive selection process, we ended up with iO. We developed a platform strategy and an implementation plan. Thanks to the close collaboration and mutual trust, we were able to deliver stunning results together. The optimisation process is now in full swing.”

Dolf Blomhert, CMO at Favorite Gifts

UX research as a foundation for a user-friendly order process

To ensure that our development efforts delivered the desired results, we researched the online behaviour and demands of shop visitors through UX research. Our user research showed that a user-friendly product configurator was essential to the order process. Consequently, we looked into the demands for a user-friendly product configurator. Through user testing, we tested various clickable prototypes, after which we developed and implemented the version that would get us the highest conversion rate.

Reliable hosting and data coupling with AWS

Another important aspect is the data and uptime of an online shop. We rely on our trusted AWS infrastructure to host and implement various AWS services:

We made sure that product media would load quickly thanks to the storage service Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront as our Content Delivery Network (CDN)
To import the enormous amount of product data, we divided the import process across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. The data is transferred securely from Favorite Gifts through Amazon MQ
To make the online shop flexible and peak-proof, we hosted the APIs for the product configurator on separate Amazon EC2 instances

“Because of the communication and impeccable expertise, the people of iO are a part of the family at Favorite Gifts. It’s lovely to see how the iO and Favorite Gifts people are working on this project as a team, finding each other and solutions whenever unexpected challenges arise. We see iO as one of our most important partners in Favorite Gifts’ growth.”

Dolf Blomhert, CMO Favorite Gifts

The result: the online shops of all the brands on a single e-commerce platform

The result is a single flexible and scalable e-commerce platform with a user-friendly order process and seamless user experience. To give each brand a unique brand experience, every online shop was given its own style. Furthermore, marketers were given the option to get creative with the homepage.

For Favorite Gifts, the main benefit is the cost and time efficiency. Because all the online shops run on a single e-commerce platform and only the style is different, the go-lives of the three online shops came in close succession. And if we need technical adjustments, we can carry out the changes for all online shops at the same time.

The results are undeniable

online shops on a single e-commerce platform

100%

SEO Google Lighthouse score thanks to the Hyvä Themes integration

store views because of the availability of the online shops in different languages and countries

AWS services that create a reliable, flexible and scalable platform

6,000

available products

Adding the fourth brand to the same e-commerce platform

Another benefit is that we can add new online shops for other brands to the same platform relatively quickly. And that’s precisely what we’re doing. The fourth brand of Favorite Gifts, Giving Europe, is getting a new online shop – meaning it’s being added to the same e-commerce platform. Because Giving Europe is a wholesaler and, therefore, has a different target audience than the other three brands, we also applied UX research and design to this project. We did that to make sure the online shop would match the demands and the online behaviour of the target audience.

We found that the customers of Giving Europe are looking for a full-fledged sales partner. That’s why customers want access to custom prices, product media and bulk pricings with a personal login. Additionally, the product configurator will get a new design to customise and order multiple products and versions, as well as expedite and simplify requesting prices.

All these optimisations contribute to our common goal: making sure that online shoppers can order the perfect promotional gift in as few clicks as possible, making Favorite Gifts grow even more.