Magical Transformation: Marina Home Amplifying Digital Capabilities with Codilar
Company Overview
Marina Home is a go-to for premium home fashion. Beyond just aesthetics, Marina Home transforms living spaces, making it not just any brand, but a promise – a promise of creativity and handcrafted elegance. With a rich legacy of over two and a half decades, Marina Home is all about embracing diversity and creating furniture pieces that radiate vibrancy, inspiration, and unique personalization. Each one-of-a-kind design breathes life into homes, scripting personalized stories for every living space
Though Marina Home had a robust online presence spanning the Middle East, North America, and the Indian Subcontinent, they faced significant challenges that turned out to be detrimental in diminishing their website responsiveness. They teamed up with Codilar, a premier eCommerce solution provider to develop a high-end website and mobile application, incorporating the best solutions to elevate their user experience.
Objectives & Challenges
Marina Home, a leading home fashion tycoon has been redefining living spaces with an amazing fusion of urban flair and exotic charm. However, they have been facing critical issues related to website responsiveness, resulting in suboptimal customer experience, increased bounce rates, and revenue loss.
Their objective was to construct a flexible eCommerce platform, seamlessly aligning with global standards and, at the same time, offering web pages that loaded within split seconds. The idea was to transform their eCommerce presence and achieve omnichannel consistency by gaining comprehensive insights into the customer journey while addressing the pressing issues outlined below. Additionally, they sought to develop an iOS mobile application, overcoming the barriers of a mobile-driven marketplace to present a website-like vibe, snugly integrating with immersive experiences.
Objectives
Slow Loading Images: Marina Home aimed at delivering pure elegance through high-resolution visuals. However, being unaware of the loading time required for each image, a drastic impact on website performance was observed. Unoptimized larger-sized images, coupled with higher resolutions, consumed considerable bandwidth, resulting in slow and unresponsive websites. This made customers leave the site quickly, increasing bounce rates.
Cache Issues on Multiple Pages: The website suffered from numerous caching issues, resulting in half-loaded pages with not-so user-friendly formats. The website appeared weird as important information wasn't showing up, and pictures were all-over-the-place. The reasons for such delay were bad code, too many extensions, a heavy database, and poorly configured servers, making navigation a tedious task, and increasing the system's uptime from 80% to 99.98%
Subpar Server Performance: Despite operating on the latest Magento version, Marina Home encountered frequent server failures due to underperforming shared servers located far from users. This led to slow response times, resulting in a significant loss of traffic and conversions, directly impacting the brand's bottom line.
Heavy Banners on the Home Page: Balancing the desire for high-quality banners with a fast-loading website posed another challenge. The commitment to a captivating first impression conflicted with the need for speed, as heavy banners occupied valuable space, impeding the effective display of other products or services.
Uncertainty in the User Journey: Comprehending how users navigate through the website was difficult, making it challenging to identify potential bottlenecks and areas for enhancement. This further created complications in designing an engaging and efficient shopping platform.
Poor Website Ranking: SEO issues became a common bottleneck for Marina Home's online visibility and ranking in the SERPs. The combination of slow page speed, delayed server response time, and heavy-to-load images created friction in the customer journey. This issue significantly hindered organic traffic to the website.
Heavy Merged JavaScripts: Marina Home encountered challenges in efficiently loading heavily merged JavaScripts. Because, more often, merging resulted in the inclusion of irrelevant JS files to be loaded when customers requested a page, compromising the website's capability to load quickly and deliver a smooth user experience.
Solution Approach
To better serve the brand's diverse customer base spanning the UAE, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain, Marina Home required a sophisticated digital platform that reflects its commitment and personalized shopping experience. After careful compilation of all the requirements of Marina Home, our Adobe-certified experts designed the new Marina Home Progressive Web App (PWA), marking a transformative moment for the brand's digital presence all while considering the technical feasibility, economic constraints, and time frame for each task.
While we had the core ideas in place, realizing them required a team equipped with both technological prowess and creative brilliance to bring these ideas to life, and at Codilar we found experts with the desired skill sets to get things rolling.
Initially, we executed strategic planning, employing agile methodologies and sprint development cycles to accelerate the project. We decoded their existing technical barriers and implemented our profound knowledge to integrate it with appropriate solutions. Subsequently, the thorough testing of the execution phases not only ensured quality but also allowed us to visualize the impact on Marina Home's website and mobile application.
Solution Highlights
Image CDN
Marina Home's web and app pages were optimized in the most efficient way possible by using the Gumlet image content delivery network (CDN). With this implementation, images are fetched from the nearest server to ensure swift content delivery, enabling users to witness a notable difference in the image load speed. The outcome was a visually appealing online store with high-quality images and reduced payload, effectively showcasing the diverse range of furniture selections.
cWarmer
Our design team eliminated all unnecessary loaders that caused interruptions in user experience, making the site align with modern usability standards. Not only did we make the frontend more maintainable by enhancing the code quality with advanced frameworks and best practices, but we also ensured a seamless navigation and enhanced UI functionality through user acceptance testing.
iOS Mobile Application Development
Designed and developed mobile applications for iPhones to simplify users' life with a more convenient, engaging, and efficient platform for shopping, exploring, and purchasing furniture.
Upgraded Server to Optimize Load Time and Site Speed
Marina Home's strategic upgrade of its server efficiently addressed challenges related to slow-loading images, thereby transforming its digital space into a faster and more responsive platform. A drastic reduction in bounce rate is being observed, ultimately boosting engagement and revenue.
Smart AI Search
Using Klevu AI, Marina Home's iOS application offers a more intuitive search experience. With its refined filters users can now easily find what they're looking for. Additionally, the app provides a precise count of products within each category, ensuring users receive real-time updates on product availability for a more satisfying browsing experience.
Reduced the banners on home pages
Streamlining the number of banners on the home page not only led to a notable increase in Marina Home's website traffic but also allowed for improved tracking of user activities, including impressions, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and behavioral patterns. This optimization resulted in a more efficient website speed, enhancing the overall user experience.
Interactive Product Visualization with AR and 3D
Employing 3D rendering, interactive 360-degree product views, and virtual room setups were established to project products into the real world. This significantly enhanced customer experience as it allowed shoppers to visualize how a product seamlessly complemented their living space, delivering an immersive virtual shopping experience.
Unmerged JavaScript to Reduce Load Time
Marina Home witnessed an instrumental boost in load speed by unmerging JavaScripts. By eliminating the unnecessary complexities introduced by merged scripts, unmerging streamlines the loading process. This strategic move reduces the number of irrelevant JS files, enabling quicker page loads and significantly enhancing the overall speed and efficiency of Marina Home's website.
Results
and Impact
Codilar's strategic intervention with expert technical integrations yielded remarkable results for the Marina Home website and iOS application. The brand's persona was successfully reflected through a highly responsive website featuring an intuitive user interface.
Customer engagement increased by 58% through interactive design tools and personalization features.
Average order value grew by 43% as customers were able to visualize complete room solutions.
Product customization requests increased by 67% following the launch of advanced personalization tools.
Customer satisfaction improved by 48% due to enhanced shopping experience and design inspiration features.