Developing a global eCommerce solution for Bloom Perfumery

Bloom is a famous London perfumery that focuses on curating a collection of unique, exclusive, and outstanding scents from brands around the world. They seek out only the best perfume talent to showcase in their concept boutique. The perfumery appropriately refers to themselves as “merchant adventurers searching the globe to bring the most fun and well-made fragrances to curious noses' attention.”

Bloom offers individual perfume fitting consultations, to help their customers select their optimal scent from the perfumery’s exquisite selection of perfumes and ingredients. Their ever-growing collection focuses purely on quality and beauty, rather than on any specific brands. Bloom’s perfumers forego the use of mass produced scents and materials, in favor of carefully grown, harvested, and distilled natural ingredients.

At their brick-and-mortar store in London, Bloom customers can use the perfume laboratory to create their own unique scents. On the Bloom Perfumery website, which Evrone helped develop, customers can purchase perfumes and cosmetics or sign up for a session in the perfume lab.

The challenge

In 2016, Bloom’s founders approached Evrone for help developing a better e-commerce solution for the niche retailer. While they already had a website in production, it was missing some key functions and needed improvements.

First, they wanted to add a new make-up section and shades feature for their cosmetic products. This would require adding a new entity to the application architecture and associating it with the current functionality, which would be difficult to achieve, due to the existing legacy code.

Second, they needed an improved search engine, with an algorithm for narrowing the ecommerce site search results. Third, they wanted to redesign the entire site and develop a mobile version. Finally, they needed to make changes to the checkout functionality to account for various user options, allowing customers to log-in, register for an account, or skip registration.

In addition, we had to implement new e-commerce delivery services that would allow Bloom to ship globally. The e-commerce shipping solutions had to accommodate for the varying restrictions and regulations on the shipment and delivery of liquid products to countries around the world.

Migrating to Shopify

Instead of tacking on multiple disparate functions to the existing Bloom site, we determined that they would be best served by migrating the entire site to the Shopify platform. While this would be a difficult undertaking, it would also cover many of their needs, while providing them with additional beneficial features and solutions for the niche market. So, we took on the challenge of transferring Bloom’s website to Shopify, while preserving the existing design and functionality of the pages to the maximum.

Why we chose Shopify

Shopify is one of the most robust and reliable eCommerce software solutions in the industry. It gives merchants the option to use a single platform with all of the necessary e-commerce and POS functionalities already built in. Shopify is an excellent choice for eCommerce merchants, since it offers:

Ease of Use - Users don’t need to be especially tech-savvy or know how to code to use Shopify. The platform is simple to use and extremely user friendly, and they provide comprehensive guides to introduce new users to the platform.

24/7 Support - They have a dedicated support team that is always available to help clients and answer any questions they might have. There is also an active user community that can provide additional support or assistance.

Quality Designs - Clients can choose from a massive selection of design templates and themes, which are both desktop and mobile-friendly, or they can create or purchase their own designs.

Flexibility and Scalability - Shopify gives users full access to the code, allowing more technical clients to customize their sites beyond the core offerings, and the robust platform allows for easy scaling.

Apps and Add-ons - The Shopify App Store has numerous add-ons, many of which are free, so users can integrate the best solutions and features for their site.

On top of all this, Shopify is quite affordable and offers comprehensive packages. Users don’t need to worry about additional server costs, as they are included in the plan, along with other features like access to the software, security, customer support, and Shopify reports.

Tech stack

We handled both the backend and frontend development for Bloom’s new website. The website was developed in Ruby on Rails, while Elasticsearch was used to implement the site search function.

We used Realex Payments for payments, MaxMind DB to determine the user's country, Unisender for emailing functionality, and Facebook OmniAuth Authentication.

In addition, we took on the challenge of learning to use some new tools, ODFReport and libreconv, for generating PDF documents and the Active Merchant library for accepting payments.

The results

We successfully migrated Bloom’s entire site to Shopify and realized all of the necessary improvements to their online store, including the redesign of the ecommerce checkout flow, generation of PDF reports, refinement of search engine filtration, and the addition of a promo code generator, discounts, and new product parameters.

In the end, we helped Bloom Perfumery increase their online presence and gain more customers. They are now one of the most popular niche perfumeries and provide global shipping to allow customers around the world access to their exclusive, high-quality collection.

Tips for migrating your e-commerce site to Shopify

If you’re looking for an e-commerce solution for a niche online store, Shopify is a great option. They have many excellent user guides to help you get started. However, for many people, moving their entire existing site to Shopify is a daunting task. There are several different ways you can go about this.

You can simply copy and paste content, use one of the migration apps available on the Shopify App store, use CSV files to transfer your data manually, or build your own app that uses the Admin API. The best solution depends on how much and what kind of data and content you need to transfer. You may also end up using a combination of these methods, to make sure all of your data is transferred over efficiently and correctly. Once the data migration process is complete, you’ll need to go through everything to make sure that it was imported accurately.

Feel free to contact us if you need more information on how to import a website into Shopify, or you’re looking for help with your Ruby e-commerce software solution development.