Gruppo Buffetti S.p.A. was new to the e-commerce market, and wanted a open-source solutions which will be both affordable (as compared to other proprietary solutions) and completely customizable and flexible to fit the special requests of the project.

They choose MageSpecialist as a solution partner judging its team met all the know-how, skills, and capacities required for the task; plus, the customer wanted an Italian company for both follow-up reasons and strategic deployment.

The customer had specific requests concerning the integration between Magento backend and J.D. Edwards® ERP software in use. Particularly, they wanted to:

• Have all products imported at least once a day from JDE database to Magento.
• Have all orders from Magento imported back to JDE.
• Have all Magento customers synced with JDE entries, and vice-versa.
• Export the whole catalog towards Google Shopping and other price comparators alike.
• Integrate FACT-Finder® technology into Magento search.
• Heavily modify the checkout/registration steps so to integrate geo-localization of the nearest retailer from the customer, and both a gift-points reward system and a homage system.
• Have tier prices recalculated from standard Magento model so to be integrated directly into JDE export flux.
• Give resellers a dedicated backend panel to manage orders which were set to pick-up and pay at their own store.
• Being on top of search engine queries with a complete SEO optimization strategy.

• Give resellers a dedicated backend panel to manage orders which were set to pick-up and pay at their own store.
• Being on top of search engine queries with a complete SEO optimization strategy.

Third-party software involved in the project were, along with the aforementioned J.D. Edwards® integration, also FACT-Finder® conversion engine software from Omikron Gmbh. The system was provided a stream of data exporting daily the entire Magento catalog (products, attributes, categories) to provide an enhanced user search experience.

The first problem the project encountered was of course having an adequate planning of all the features, to reduce to acceptable amount any scope creep which would be incurred.
This resulted in three whole months of intense brainstorming and meetings between the customer's project managers and MageSpecialist developement team.
After schematizing all customer's needs for integrating already existing selling routines into e-commerce workflows, then the project entered developement state.
Also it was crucial to conceive a custom layout and graphic theme which accomodated the specificity of customer's products and the customer well-knows brand presence; said layout then undergone in late 2011 a heavy restyling, following split-tests and user-interface studies conducted with advanced webmaster tools and live statistical samples.

Surely Magento was the wisest solution to implement such a complex system because of the incredible flexibility and stability of its framework.

The whole project entered developement stage in late 2010 and debuted online on July 30, 2011. Following this date, a test phase was conducted, which lasted another 3-4 months. Finally, the e-shop was finally launched with advertizing campaigns and such in late 2011.
Since then, the project has always been under developement and improvement to add new features and refine those already present.

In the end, Gruppo Buffetti S.p.A. was very pleased with the results obtained and the new project's outcome.
They never took the way of e-commerce before, fearing it wasn't simple to integrate existing workflows to which their resellers were accustomed to such a diverse marketing model. In recent days, however, they begun guessing it was time to explore this market to match their competitors online, and for their customers expected them to be present as an online retailer, too.

In a short time however (less than 2 months) from the end of test period they were able to score the initial goal of € 100k+ sold, with a monthly increase of +30% of both orders and order's average value.

Their goal for 2012 is to match a tentative € 1,5 billion sold.

“Buffetti Shop was the single most challenging project our company has ever confronted since it started working on Magento in early 2008. However, it was also the most satisfying to overcome, for both MS team and the customer were really pleased with the result, and already planning new features to be released!”

Tommaso Galmacci
Project Manager – MageSpecialist.

“We found in Magento the perfect solution to implement our project's very demanding specifics, and in MageSpecialist's team the perfect technology partner to have the project done and our online store finally running, and selling.”

Ermanno Paini
CEO – Gruppo Buffetti S.p.A.

MageSpecialist

MageSpecialist is an Italy-based company born from the project of a team of professionals in the world wide web and information technology fields.
They had the opportunity, in a professional career spanning several years, to try a vast array of diverse e-commerce solutions, both open-source and commercial. No one of these solutions had the same power, flexibility and consistency of Magento, which resulted in the company specializing vertically in providing complete e-commerce solutions based on Magento.

Gruppo Buffetti S.p.A.

Gruppo Buffetti S.p.A. is the Italian leader in the distribution of primary interest products, services and solutions for offices destined to the market of professionals, artisans, merchants, small and medium-sized enterprises and, more recently, a growing number of home workers.

Particularly during the the last decade, Buffetti has qualified as a reference market for accountants, hoteliers, restaurateurs, clothing stores and companies with their own management software solutions thanks to the role of advice and assistance provided by its Affiliates in the area.

Most of the products and services offered are developed by Buffetti and marketed under brands, while their production is entrusted to a third party.

The distribution of products is made through a franchise network of about 800 stores, spreading all across the country.

In addition Buffetti distributes a narrower range of office products to more than 1300 independent stationery under the brand name Flex Products and over 600 independent stationery under the brand Data Office.