Stoll Espresso from Lindau on Lake Constance is a coffee and espresso machine specialist. For years, it has focused on filter holder espresso machines and coffee grinders. Next to accessories and consumables, Stoll Espresso offers its customers a handpicked selection of fine coffees. As an authorised specialist retailer, Stoll Espresso sells only 1A branded products and focuses on offering the highest level of service to its customers, which starts with first-class advice, checkout process and delivery, and continues through warranty management and repair.
As this quality of standard should also be reflected in the online shop, the Stoll Espresso team chose to switch from their previous shop system, Magento, to Shopware. As Katrin Stoll, Managing Director of Stoll Espresso, explains: "Our previous shop system was no longer satisfactory. When we were looking for a suitable shop system that met our requirements, Shopware stood out for the following reasons in particular:
Developer-friendly & leading technology
Shopware is designed inherently for the needs of the German and European market
Shopware is developed in Germany and distributed widely
Thorough documentation
Free connection to Actindo, enterprise resource planning software
Switch to responsive web design and reduction in the number of systems
Reduction of development, maintenance and testing costs, and improved updatability
From our perspective, the weaknesses of Magento can be attributed to its demand for resources and high maintenance costs. Magento is rightly seen as overengineered – updating plugins and the core was a challenge and involved high testing costs. A complex caching system had to be used to operate Magento with a high level of performance.” At the same time, the company wanted to improve Stoll Espresso’s brand recognition as a specialist for filter holder espresso machines. To achieve this, the product presentation had to be improved, along with increasing both traffic and turnover through organic search and direct customers. "In order to reduce costs while increasing our SEO effectiveness, we wanted to switch from external SEO providers to in-house SEO," Katrin explains. With the relaunch, Stoll Espresso also wanted to reduce the system diversity, integrate modern developer tools and workflows, and implement better maintainability in terms of faster and more cost-effective response times.
All objectives were discussed and developed into a concept with implementing partner agency agency soft.works, a full-service Shopware partner. The Shopware edition chosen was the Shopware Professional Plus, which includes all Premium Plugins.
After just four months of development, the new Stoll Espresso online shop went live. Raphael Boos, Managing Director of soft.works, explains how the objective of improved updatability was achieved: "We inherited the shop theme fully from the standard responsive Shopware template and adapted it to our customer's corporate design, so its origin is no longer recognisable. This means that our customer has maximum updatability with the new online shop."
"A particular challenge in the relaunch was the data migration of our heavily modified Magento legacy system to Shopware. All customer accounts, orders, products and evaluations should be available in Shopware. The Shopware migration tool reached its limits here, but everything worked in the end and all 600 products were migrated successfully. Connecting to our ACTINDO enterprise resource planning software was also extremely easy," explains Stoll.
Most of Stoll Espresso's products have a high number of attributes. These attributes were shown grouped by topic in datasheets. All product pages are therefore extensively enriched with content. These detailed product descriptions also contribute to a low number of returns.
Example of a product datasheet
The relaunch was paid off after just six months. The extremely successful KPIs also reflect this: The organic traffic showed an increase of over 40% and turnover increased by 37% compared to the previous year. Direct traffic also improved by 25%, which had an effect on turnover, which increased by 20% from the previous year. The Stoll Espresso team also reported a 7% increase in session length and a 4% increase in the conversion rate.
The value of the average shopping cart dropped slightly, but, as Stoll explains, this should be seen positively: "Due to the use of our new payment methods, Amazon Pay and PayPal PLUS, and better structuring of the accessories, we have considerably increased the number of orders. We now have far more customers who also order accessories, consumables and coffee from us, both for new customers and existing customers".
Stoll Espresso's objective of improving updatability has also been met: "The maintainability compared to Magento is a dream – all updates can now be performed quickly in our developer and live environment with considerably less test effort. Since the start of the development, 20 core updates and hundreds of plugin updates have been carried out without any problem. All changes can be tracked in the changelog and in Git," says Stoll.
This objective has been met fully with a considerable cost reduction in SEO and increased effectiveness: "We have removed all external providers. On-page SEO is implemented fully by the editors on entry. Our investment in skills and training is paying off in full," says Stoll.
In addition, Stoll Espresso is also using some of the Premium Plugins included for free in the Professional PLUS Licence. This means that customers can enjoy attractive bundles, among many other positive features in the online shop.
"We are very happy with the decision to switch to Shopware. We have achieved our objectives, not least of all thanks to the excellent cooperation with Raphael Boos from soft.works. We can sum up by saying that it was the best and fastest shop change. We're now looking forward to improving our customers' shopping experience even more. To do this, we're planning on integrating Shopping Advisor and using Storytelling within our Shopping Worlds. We're also planning to launch our online shop internationally", says the managing director.
