Store build automation
Introduction
MN&O Marketing and Designs is a company that creates and maintains online stores
of aesthetics practices in the US. They had built around 200 stores at the time
Scimus joined the project. They were struggling with the quality of stores being
created and development resources time it takes to build a store in a way to
meet practice needs.
TWe as a company were able to look at those
problems from another angle and proposed to automate all processes to the point
when practice administrators can build a store by themselves.
This vision has well paid off, as MN&O was able to double their customer base
and lower setup fee from $3000 - $5000 to $250, which opened them new market
opportunities.
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The Story of MN&O Marketing
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Our customer has extensive experience with e-commerce in the aesthetics industry, they started their business around 10 years ago by providing shopping carts using Magento.
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MN&O started as a “friends and family” company by people who had experience in the aesthetics industry. They have done a tremendous journey from 4 to 80 people in just a couple years by providing great service to independent aesthetics practices as well as aesthetics companies and manufacturers.
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But when they started to get more traction, MN&O realized that their solution was not scalable enough to acquire new customers quickly and not lose the quality of the work that was done. Technically they reached the point where they needed to scale from a little boutique business to a full scale company.
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But a problem was that the existing development team got used to doing things the way they were doing it before, which means scaling was under a thread.
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At that point MN&O contacted Scimus and asked to evaluate a situation and propose a solution that can be implemented in order to help them with their goal.
The Problem of Scalability
When MN&O started to get more traction, they realized that their solution was not
scalable enough to acquire new customers quickly and cost efficiently with the
same or higher quality of the work that was done. They reached the point where
they needed to scale from a little boutique business to a full scale company.
But a problem was that the existing development team got used to doing things
the way they were doing it before, which meant scaling was under a
thread.
At that point MN&O contacted Scimus and asked to evaluate a situation and
propose a solution that can be implemented in order to help them with their
goal.
Why MN&O Chose Scimus
The MN&O CEO and CTO did some research and found us on Upwork. They liked
feedback and projects we completed at the time, so they decided to contact us
via LinkedIn and set up a call to explain a situation.
Scimus had taken a couple days to brainstorm and come up with a plan to solve a
scalability problem. Plan was pretty simple. Instead of updating existing
processes to speed up development and cut the time to market, we proposed to get
rid of store development as a whole and provide all necessary tools for practice
admins to build any store they want. In theory this change should provide an
opportunity to infinite scaling possibilities, as all processes totally rely on
the customer.
How Scimus Responded
At the beginning, NMA were not convinced that plan would work out, as this was
our first interaction with them and our proposal was a big change for them that
required a lot of time and resources to implement.
So we started slow, by providing test automation services only, to at least get
a quality and testing time out of the way. But after a couple months, we were
able to show our expertise, ability to solve complex problems and that our
approach makes sense. Which triggered MN&O to provide a green light on
implementation of the original plan.
The Results
- Store development time was decreased from 80+ hours to 0.
- At this time they are able to get an order and deliver a new store the same day.
- Setup fee was decreased from $3000-$5000 to $250. Which significantly increased interest in services, as the end customer does not have to pay thousands of dollars upfront to validate a solution.
- Double a customer base. Using a new approach for store build MN&O was able to focus on customer acquisition and was able to grow a customer base from 200 to 400.
- But the most important from our side, we were able to develop strong partnership relations with MN&O. They know that if they need any development they can always come to us and we will do whatever it takes to achieve the results needed.
