Bringing shopping mall products online

We had the fortune to take on Iceland’s largest ecommerce project to date. It involved the
digitization of Iceland’s largest, oldest and most respected shopping mall, Kringlan.
Our role in the project was to bring together the product offerings of all the different stores in the
shopping mall and publish them on Kringlan’s own website , kringlan.is. With pricing, photos,
product information and stock availability, all up to date information down to 15 minute
intervals.

Challenge

The main challenge of gathering all this product data was the source being over 100 stores.
Each having different ERP systems or ecommerce solutions. Each store had its own
preference how it wanted to provide the data, and some did not have the ability to provide
data at all. Some stores had already an established ecommerce website and wanted data to
be copied from there while others did not have a website at all.
The solution had to be “simple” for each store owner so they would want to collaborate in
this large undertaking. Costs had to be reasonable. Timing of the project could not exceed a
year, the mall was hoping for a 6 month deployment period. The solution had to offer the
ability that each store could manipulate its own product data, and control what was
published on Kringlan’s website . There was a demand from the mall owners that they would
have their own quality control agent which had the final say what products would qualify to
appear on the website and in what categories they would be. Other challenges were to
standardize connections and streamline processes. Have monitoring capabilities over the
connections and control how rapidly the product data would be refreshed. Communications
with a wide range of service providers of different ERP and ecommerce systems was also
challenging and time consuming. Finally the mall wanted to have the ability in the near future
to enable click and collect and payment features but would not want to implement them until
later.

Key Achievements

With our already established cloud platform that we had been developing over the past few
years which we call Integrator, we were able to connect to each store’s platform of choice
using API and those stores that did not have API capabilities they were provided with various
options to import their catalog into our platform and then continue enriching the products in
our platform before publishing them to kringlan.is.
We are very proud of the deployment time we achieved, being almost launch ready with our
system 6 months from signing the contract. Deployment time is based on many factors and
varies of course based on each customers needs and demands. This demonstrates how well
established our platform is and its design from the ground up taking on a multitude of
challenges that we faced in this project.
Due to the nature of causing unnecessary load on the customers sites, and not being able to
fetch data as frequently as needed resulting in outdated data we went into the project with
that in mind. We wanted to prevent web scraping as much as possible and the end result
was no scraping techniques were used in the project.
Only live data is synced over API through our own privately developed connectors that were
standardized as much as possible and where needed we created custom connectors. This
approach simplified the maintenance of our platform significantly which is created from the
ground up as a SaaS solution in full development. By choosing our platform clients are not
buying into a set and forget solution but a live platform that is maintained to work with the
ERP and ecommerce solutions so the connectors will be updated as needed.
If the store owner decided to leave the mall it can take it’s investment in its product catalog
with it by using our system as a PIM solution and connect it to its own ecommerce solution,
this is a huge benefit for the stores.
We also created our own addon Woo-Commerce API that was capable of retrieving better
information then the standard one. Because of how the platform was designed with
scalability and long time maintenance and further development in mind as a cloud product
we were able to overcome vast challenges.
One key achievement and a selling point for the shopping mall owner to get store owners
onboard in this project was the opportunity for them to catapult their business to
ecommerce if they had not started any work in that realm. By opting in, they got their own
PIM solution where they had their own integrator platform to maintain and work on their
products and build up their product catalog with descriptions and pictures etc. Also the
ability to add their very own ecommerce webstore by simply linking their already established
catalog they had connected to kringlan.is on their own domain.
One of the greatest benefits for the shopping center in choosing our platform is that price is
scalable. After initial opt in cost of the shopping center, they could control how much was
spent on implementing the platform based on how many stores they wanted to start from.
Price is based on connectors against stores and if the owners want to start small they select
few primary stores first and can later add more stores when ready to finance more.

Technology

Our platform is built using latest technologies mainly built on Microsoft .NET framework and
consists of different layers, and each layer is maintainable and scalable on its own, so we
can scale the system as needed and what layers are needed.
We decided to use a NoSQL database for this project to be able to maintain a complex data
structure and keeping performance and scaling options as good as possible. Our database
engine of choice was MongoDB.
Each connector is developed and built separately as an add on module to the system so they
can be developed and maintained individually without affecting the rest of the system in the
process.
The system notifies the Elastic Search engine of changes of products to trigger an update
job on the search engine’s side.
The products API is highly capable and can sanitize and organize the data before the search
engine is fetches the updated data.

Results

Product offerings from all stores published on kringlan.is with up to date pricing and stock.
The webmaster of kringlan has its own Master interface (Master Integrator) where he can
manage all the product information and connections from each store in the shopping mall. It
was crucial for him to be able to quality check product data before publishing. He can filter
data, easily work on huge amount of data in simple handling. Add information, edit
information, create special fields etc.
Each store owner has also the same capabilities as they also have the same user interface
but only to work on the data from their own store. They can control what is published or
simply sync data from their own ecommerce solution hands off. These features for each
webmaster is a crucial quality control point for them to ensure the product information
quality published on their website.
Since our platform is a SaaS solution we monitor each connector for each client and
maintain quality and unbroken datastreams.
Bringing product offering of shopping malls online opens them up to online customers and
helps them cope in the evolving retail market with ever increasing consumption taking place
online. It is our belief that this is the step to take for shopping centers and malls to stay
competitive in the years to come.