The Black Red White Group is the largest group of furniture manufacturers in Poland. Next to their flag products, they also distribute a variety of home interior accessories.
The Capital Group comprises Black Red White S.A. and its 18 subsidiaries, including 10 abroad. You can find their product offers in almost 60 markets around the world.
Tasks and objectives
The Black Red White Group is our long-term client. During our 10-year cooperation, we assisted in the development of its e-commerce solutions from scratch.
For several years, the Black Red White Group has been using our technology solutions for online sales. The project is constantly evolving with new functionalities and solutions. The custom designed service plays an important role in building image and brand awareness, and constitutes an additional distribution channel.
The service has many functionalities dedicated to retail customers. It presents extensive product cards enabling the ability to check for details such as fronts, bodies, or table-top colour, as well as key features like assembly instructions, users' reviews, or related products, and the published content is enhanced by the inclusion of YouTube videos. We have completed a series of works to improve the usability of the service and optimised it for search engine positioning.
The implementation was associated with the platform integration of other systems previously used by the client, such as:
- Fact-Finder search engine,
- Quartic recommendations system,
- Allegro - online trading platform,
- Opineo.pl - service of online shop evaluations,
- TD Integral platform,
- HRlink - system for recruiting employees on-line,
- SARE - e-mailing platform,
- ERP (Safo and Maat) - internal systems.
Furthermore, the product feed was prepared containing a description and product attributes available on the online store. Product file enables communication between BRW.com.pl, YouLead and the Homebook.pl platforms.
The service was recognised in the third edition of the e-Commerce Polska awards and also awarded as the best online shop in "Home & Garden" category at this year’s Webstarfestival.
PWA implementation and mobile optimization
The company intended to build a mobile app as well as to improve the operation of their website mobile version. The BRW company cherishes its customers greatly and wanted to provide them with the best experience while shopping - on desktop and a mobile platform. To achieve these goals, in the latest implementation, we developed the Progressive Web App (PWA) for an online store at www.brw.pl.
In order to introduce the PWA technology, first, we had to re-design the current web and expand cart mechanisms. Last, but not least, we also improved the UX for mobile shoppers.
Like before, the users access the new online store via a web browser, now it is working better and faster. At this point, it is hard to tell the difference between the PWA and a standard web. It looks and behaves like an application. The users do not need to bother with downloading and installing it on the device.
The PWA uses a special mechanism, Service Workers, which enables processing and displaying data, push notifications - even if you’re momentarily offline. On top of that, we used the Network First (Network Falling Back to Cache) strategy. It also supports using the progressive app with no internet connection. This solution captures the sub-pages data that the users displayed most recently.
Now, all pages that customers were watching are available offline – except for the items in a shopping cart.
The users can comfortably browse all the offers and even add products to Favourites despite being offline.
During the implementation, we applied the indexedDB (Indexed Database API) to save users’ favourite items. This way, the system keeps all the users’ actions in the cache in an offline mode. Later on, our Client can use all the stored data in Google Analytics, for example, to analyse the prospective customers’ behaviour and their path to purchase.
What's more, we optimized the website’s speed. As a result, the store’s capabilities increased several times. The client specifically requested for the page not load in full but adjust to the users’ actions. Thanks to the SPA (Single Page Application) technology, the website’s interface became dynamic. Now, the page elements are being rendered as the users view them. This approach reduces the overall page loads and the usage of IT resources.
To increase the page loading speed, we applied SSR (Server-Side Rendering) technology. The rendering process itself takes place directly on the server without prior data downloading and processing. We based the SSR on the Nuxt framework which runs on the Node.js server.
The PWA ensures the correct content display on each device, including smartphones, computers, and even TV sets. Now, the BRW provides a fully positive and comfortable experience to all customers – no matter what device they use.
Main benefits for the Client
- The PWA technology enhances the online store possibilities,
- the application works efficiently and smoothly,
- boosts the mobile users' experience,
- provides the comfort of use,
- works offline,
- the new technologies support the website positioning (SEO),
- the IT solutions introduced help to optimize the budget.
... and what can we do for you ?
Clients rate our comprehensive approach to project implementation and business consulting very well. This is one of the main reasons we are considered by Clutch as a leading eCommerce Software Development Team in Poland.
In our daily work, we help to develop our clients' businesses. Their trust and effective cooperation make us grow as well. January, 2022, the new edition of Forbes Diamond Award report was published. We are proud to be listed among the fastest-growing Polish enterprises in this prestigious report.