Flex Laptop Centre
Case study: The agile development of the Flex.ee e-shop
The story of the Flex Laptop Centre
25 years ago, a family established a company named OÜ Fleksont. Today, it is one of the biggest sellers of laptop computers in Estonia (in total, they have sold more than 40 000 computers in). The brand, FLEX Laptop Centre, has shops in Tartu and Tallinn, but their most prominent sales channel is their e-shop, flex.ee.
Before finding Acty, FLEX had developed their e-shop platform independently. The company had long-term e-commerce experience, but at one point, all their web developers had moved on and there was no one to handle the practicalities of the webshop anymore. The company decided to drop the previously developed platform because its development did not seem reasonable in the long term.
The whole e-shop had to be moved to a new environment, Magento. As it often happens with website projects, many details were unclear at the beginning of the project. To proceed, an agile development approach was selected, meaning that the overall job was divided into parts and the work started from focussing on the development of the most essential parts. The progress was regularly overviewed with the client and we then moved on to the next stages. This gave the client an understanding of the state of the project and enabled us to focus on the most important aspects.
The importance of product information
A great aspect for an e-shop visitor is product information, especially in the case of technology products with numerous details and functional descriptions. This is why we decided to display the most essential information of the products on the webpage to save the client from unnecessary additional clicks.
We also improved other factors of the user experience – the website was given a logical structure, helping the client to easily find the computer matching their needs. Since the range of computers in the shop is extremely wide, the initial product filter considerably simplifies the process of finding a suitable model. The purchasing process was also made more comfortable by avoiding the filling in of forms or unnecessary additional clicks. The visual solution for the Flex e-shop was minimalistic, clear, and simple.
The challenging aspect was how to make the technical information of laptops easily understandable for a client while being easily entered into the system. To solve this problem, we built an additional solution that simplifies the management of product information in the administration environment. We also differentiated product information to be able to give a quick overview to the clients.
The FLEX e-shop also has a number of automated solutions such as client-based pricing. The product information is obtained from the supplier’s warehouse and the algorithms that take into account the client’s profile offer sales prices and possible discounts to the clients.
As usual, we added the integrations for purchasing and business software with a product delivery solution.
Client feedback
“We have been working with Acty for 2 years now and so far, it’s been very productive. We were able to launch the e-shop on the new Magento 2 platform in less than 6 months and after that, we have continued with web development. We’re very happy with the work of Acty’s project manager – because we have weekly Skype meetings, everything is made simple and clear.”
Used technology
