LPDO

Discover how we transformed the LPDO brand from a small WooCommerce e-commerce site into one of the online perfumery sector’s leaders, including being featured in commercials on the Italy’s leading television network.

Client: LPDO
Service: Web design + Custom Dev + Server
Date: Since Nov 2018

The Challenge

The client required a bespoke e-commerce store featuring a high-conversion shopping page, a customized dashboard for order and product management, and a tailored multilingual solution accommodating structural variations across three languages. Additionally, the client necessitated a hosting solution robust enough to support a significant number of concurrent connections, particularly in anticipation of launching a commercial on Italy's primary television network, without suffering from crashes due to high traffic volumes.

Our Approach

We opted for WooCommerce, incorporating specific customizations to enhance both speed and flexibility. It's noteworthy that this client was initiating their online presence from the ground up, making budgetary considerations paramount initially. In this context, WooCommerce emerged as the superior option due to its cost-effectiveness.

Furthermore, to accommodate the multilingual nature of the store, we strategically developed three distinct websites. This approach allowed for a seamless user experience across different languages, while ensuring centralized management of critical data such as inventory levels and promotional codes.

In parallel, we focused on developing an enhanced custom server solution, leveraging the latest technologies and an advanced caching system. This was strategically implemented to support the anticipated surge in traffic resulting from the television commercial.

The Solution

For this e-commerce platform, which boasts over 100,000 orders, we opted to design a bespoke dashboard for efficient management of orders, inventory, coupons, and customer data. To streamline these processes, we implemented a centralized WooCommerce installation, which serves as the nucleus for inventory and coupon management. This approach allows us to utilize WooCommerce's inherent functions within our custom dashboard, enabling the e-commerce system to leverage its default mechanisms for these operations without the need to reinvent the wheel, thereby avoiding extensive testing periods spanning months.

In terms of order storage optimization, we chose to store order data in custom tables. This decision significantly enhances our capabilities for conducting full-text searches (including by name, email, and city) and generating statistics, offering a level of speed unattainable within the WordPress backend.

For the web server architecture, we selected a combination of Nginx, PHP-FPM, and Percona 8 as our database server, complemented by NGINX's Fcgi cache to expedite operations. This stack was chosen for its dual benefits:

Speed: This technology stack is renowned for its efficiency and rapid response times. Nginx serves static content quickly and handles concurrent connections with ease, PHP-FPM provides a robust and scalable way to execute PHP code, and Percona 8 offers optimized query performance for MySQL databases. The inclusion of NGINX Fcgi cache further accelerates content delivery by caching the output of repeated requests.
Low Hardware Impact: Despite its high performance, this stack is designed to minimize hardware resource consumption. Nginx and PHP-FPM are both optimized for low memory usage and high concurrency, while Percona 8 is engineered for maximum efficiency and reduced server load. This efficient utilization of resources results in lower operational costs and the ability to scale effectively without requiring significant hardware upgrades.

In summary, the chosen technology stack not only ensures the e-commerce platform can handle high traffic volumes and complex operations with ease but also does so in a way that is both resource-efficient and cost-effective, catering to the platform's growth and sustainability objectives.

Results & Impact

The custom-coded website we developed for our customer has led to significant positive results. By effectively managing high volumes of web traffic, we achieved remarkable stability, preventing downtime and crashes, which increased customer trust and satisfaction. Our optimization of backend processes accelerated operations, resulting in faster order processing and inventory management. This, in turn, enhanced the overall customer experience with quicker page load times and product delivery.

The improved efficiency reduced the need for technical interventions, saving operational costs and optimizing resource allocation. Additionally, the scalable design ensures the system can handle future growth in traffic and operational demands, laying a strong foundation for the customer's market expansion and customer base growth. Overall, the custom development has delivered enhanced stability, efficiency, customer satisfaction, cost savings, and scalability.