Katz’s Delicatessen

Magento 2.3 Based Ecommerce Website


Katz’s Delicatessen is an established restaurant since 1888 at Houston Street, New York. Each week thousands of visitors from around the world flock to Katz's to dine in this famous deli, and to feast on the most delectable sandwiches, platters, and meats. They also have their own online front where food lovers can order online. Katz’s has become an inherent part of New York’s culture. It’s spreading the same to the world with love.

challenges

with katz's web plantform

These issues were faced by the Katz’s at the time they came to Techvalens for a solution.

  1. Web Platform was very sluggish and needed a performance improvement at both front-end and back-end.
  2. Checkout was very inefficient and sometimes there were errors in the payment, resulting in losing Customer Trust.
  3. The Backend Resources were not implemented properly and caching was very inefficient costing them 900$s.
  4. Backoffice tasks such as invoicing and applying new-offers for festivals was becoming tedious.
  5. Consumers were not happy with the web platform’s UI and its sluggish behaviour.
  6. The Shipping and Checkout Component of the website was very inefficient.
  7. Katz’s Delicatessen had a very high Bounce Rate for their platform.

Note - High Bounce rate means the user opened the landing page and didn’t use the platform or use it. The reasons for that can be the slow Website may load slowly or has a bad UX.

Requirements of Katz’s Delicatessen

Katz’s platform was developed on outdated technology and Inefficient Implementation. The platform’s UI was not interactive for users. Our Client wanted a great UX for their customers. They wanted to improve the efficiency of the website so customers can order easily. The Techvalens team was also required to give a cost-effective and long-lasting solution that is easier to maintain.

Techvalens got these key-requirements from the client

  1. Migrating Backend Technologies – Magento, AWS, RDS
  2. Improve User Experience and thus Revamping User Interface
  3. Automating Backoffice tasks – Brigthpearl Invoicing

The Proposed Solution

The Techvalens team thoroughly understood the requirements. The team came up with solutions that would complete our client’s requirements and enhance the platform. Let’s understand what we did and the impact of it on the website.

Migrated Backend Technologies – Magento, AWS, RDS

Katz’s web platform had outdated backend technologies. Many of their technologies would have no support by the year 2020. Our team managed to migrate from various technologies. All Migrations and upgradations were done without breaking the website. it was a challenge as all these technologies are advanced and difficult to implement. All these technologies have proven their stability and performance and that’s why Techvalens chose them for implementation.

This is a detailed explanation of what obvious benefits each Upgradation/ Migration. You can check out the Results directly as they have the summarised result.

Magento 1.9 to 2.3: Magento is a leading E-commerce Framework that powers thousands of websites worldwide. The Katz’s Web platform was built on Magento 1.9. It has been a decent amount of time since its release. It was slow compared to today’s technologies and can’t handle more load. An obvious constraint in the performance of the platform.

The Team resolved this by proposing to upgrade to Magento 2.3 which is the current stable and long-term support version. The major challenge with this solution was that the client wanted a customized upgradation. Which might as well mean a website re-design. Techvalens Engineers handled the task with what clients wanted. Techvalens achieved efficiency and other latest features.

AWS Hosting: AWS is the Market leader of Cloud platforms and web services. It's more reliable than any other platform in the world. AWS performance is the top quality you can get. Therefore, the Techvalens team proposed to use this instead of any other platform for web services. There was a marginal increase in server response and efficiency.

AWS Hosting was done efficiently with the use of advanced features like Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Auto Scaling. These are the best tools to improve efficiency as well as provide a cost-effective solution. In brief, these features

  1. Allocate CPUs, Resources according to server load
  2. Distribute the Server load among multiple CPUs to improve efficiency

Amazon RDS for Database Hosting: Techvalens used Amazon RDS for hosting Database. Amazon Relational Database Service is a product used on AWS for maintaining Databases on the server. It can allocate memory and CPU easily to databases and can get us to a cost-effective solution.

Revamped UI – Improving the User experience

Katz’s Delicatessen’s web platform needed a revamp for their UX. Their old UI/UX was just too outdated to be used today. Other online competitors had better UI/UX. After all, a customer interacts with UI elements only of a web platform. To improve the UI, we had the best designers re-design the platform.

Not only that we also improved the efficiency on the front-end part. Techvalens tried its best to provide Katz’s with the best performance for cost.

We used various advanced methodologies like CDNs and Advanced JS bundling.

Amazon CloudFront CDNs: we hosted our media content on various CDNs or Content Delivery Networks of CloudFront. It is one of the most secure and efficient CDN out there with a worldwide reach. Using it with Amazon services makes up for an efficient integrated system. It is a very advanced solution but a cost-effective one in the long-run.

Advanced JS Bundling: This is an advanced feature of Magento 2. Advanced JS bundling improves performance significantly by providing only the essential JS packages required by the client. This reduces the load on the server and also the size of the web pages.

Overall, the Client will get better performance and faster load times even at a weak network connection.

The UI was done beautifully by designers and utilizes various JS libraries. It has cross-browser support. The web-platform is mobile friendly and thus can be accessed on any device.

Automating Backoffice Tasks - Brightpearl

Brightpearl is a leading Retail Operations Platform. It’s used to automate various Backoffice tasks like invoicing. We integrated the web platform with Brightpearl so the Katz’s can have a maintainable Invoicing for their online platform.

Techvalens improved efficiency wherever the client required.

The Result – Impact of Solutions by Techvalens

Katz’s Delicatessen got much more customers via online platform then they ever had before. It’s a clear response from the customers that the platform has been improved to such standards. The result’s say it all.

  1. Overall Site Performance improved drastically with added features
  2. Checkout became very efficient with all the features at customers hand. The improved UX makes it much easier to perform checkout operations and all without errors.
  3. Brightpearl Invoicing System has made it easier to maintain Invoicing tasks. The back-office tasks now are much easier to manage and very less time-consuming.
  4. Efficient Caching Implementation with advanced features on the backend. Thus proper use of resources and has brought the cost down from 900$s to 400$s.
  5. The platform’s UI has been revamped and advanced methods like JS Bundling is done to improve the performance on frontend.
  6. The Shipping component has been upgraded and various features are added to it. The client can now modify the data at runtime which is more efficient.
  7. Katz’s is extremely busy around holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc… The Katz’s can now easily upload various offers they want to provide to their customers easily.
  8. Katz’s has now a much lower bounce rate – which means people actually like the web platform and are using it freely.

The Conclusion for Katz’s Deli

Katz’s was very happy with our work. They have seen some drastic improvements in sales in their online platform. At the same time, their maintenance is easier. The Website’s updated software is much more efficient.

The platform’s performance reports say it all what a wonderful job was done. To us, the value comes from Customer Satisfaction. That is done when the customer feedback is positive. Until then we try to meet our customer demands in the right way.

Thank you for reading this long case-study.

Ready to begin your journey with Techvalens

We at Techvalens believe customer satisfaction is the most important factor. We will try our best and implement the most efficient solution for you. Efficient solutions are cost-effective and engage more customers than non-efficient ones. Techvalens had proven itself to implement advanced technologies, which sets it apart from other companies.

Do contact us for any assistance. We will quote your project for free. We are just a call ahead and try our best to provide excellent customer support. At Techvalens we think of ways by which can meet the goals of the customer and how can that be cost-efficient. There are no hidden costs from our clients.

Every detail is verified by the clients and then implemented. Techvalens is ready to take on challenges and have talented people and resources to complete them. Give us a chance to meet your requirements too, and rest assured.