Akademika: Ecommerce Store with 15 Million Products

Goals

Develop and upgrade the website, and improve customer experience. Key points we worked with were payment solutions, search engine and search speed, easy acquisition process, promotional functionality and features, a frameworks that makes it easier to publish and customize content on the web pages.

• Improve user experience: New responsive layout to ensure a good and intuitive user experience from all devices
• Simplify the sales process: Implement new payment solutions that make it easier to complete purchases from mobile devices
• Scaleable operation and maintenance: The new online store, and associated functionality, was placed in a cloud-based service - in this case Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What we delivered

• Business development and consulting services within content, payment, logistics, integrations and workflow
• Design, content and communication strategy
• Technical project management and coordination of third parties in the project
• Technical development of the online store solution and all necessary integrations
• Operations in Amazon Web Services
• Tracking with GA, GTM and Enhanced Ecommerce
• Support

Features of the online store

Akademika.no is one of Norway's largest online stores measured in the number of products. With that comes a need for maintenance and quality assurance of large amounts of information. Most important features:

Many sources of product information (metadata):
Akademika has an extensive import system where many different sources of metadata is used to import data into their catalog. The site unifies this information into a consistent format, and imports the needed parts into product entities.

Up to 1 million product updates per day:
The product import handles between 100 000 and 1 000 000 product updates per day. This in turn optionally would trigger search indexing and cache invalidation of different parts of the site.

Conversion of different currencies:
Rules for currency conversions are handled through several rules. In addition to actual conversion based on currency value, a currency can also be converted based on additional fees, max prices and percentage based markup relating to type of currency, and converted value.

Priority of information where multiple sources have the same product:
The product import runs through a range of different rules that decides the mapping of categories, priority of import and if the product should be eligible for purchase. The system also handles duplicated SKUs, splitting of variants, and conversion of data based on editor administrated rules.

Fast and flexible search:
The site uses elasticsearch for the search part, with many facets and automatic category landing pages.

Integrated reading lists from over 20 colleges and universities:
The site has an integration for most students in most subjects in Norway, allowing them to add all of their required and optional books for their subject, directly to cart.

Extensive B2B features:
Akademika maintains a large number of B2B customers, where prices can be set per customer or per role. They also have a dedicated checkout for OCI types of systems, allowing direct purchase through procurement systems. This work was made available to the Drupal community as a contributed module.