Groupe Marie Claire: e-commerce integrated Microsoft Business Central

The client and the challenges

Groupe Marie Claire was founded in 1965 in St-Hyacinthe, Québec. It is a family-owned business specializing in the design and retail sale of women’s ready-to-wear apparel. The company has several banners in Québec, Ontario and New Brunswick, including Le Grenier, San Francisco, Marie Claire and Claire France. These are the four online stores for which Axial had the mandate to migrate from Magento 1 to Shopify. The company was looking for a solution that would improve the efficiency of daily site management and meet the brands’ growing business objectives—in addition to eliminating the group’s technology costs.

Our objectives

Improve e-commerce management by integrating the sites with Microsoft Business Central
Elevate the overall customer experience due to the increase in online sales generated by the pandemic
Maintain good relationships and the strength of the distribution network, thanks to drive-to-store strategies
Speed up the implementation of concrete marketing initiatives

The solutions

Since the Magento 1 platform reached the end of its lifespan a few years ago, its continued use greatly limited Groupe Marie Claire in managing their websites and, as a result, in achieving their online sales objectives. Migrating to Shopify made it possible to standardize site management, reduce platform development and maintenance costs, and facilitate product entry.

Moreover, the integration with Microsoft Business Central’s ERP has greatly helped Groupe Marie Claire manage its products. After determining the flow of products, orders and purchases, we were able to optimize processes and facilitate data synchronization between different systems.

The creation of a common foundation between the four sites helped save time and gain in efficiency during all development phases. The structure will enable the platforms to evolve adequately with the subsequent development phases.

In fact, our goal was to provide an easy-to-use website that adapts to each target audience that was beginning to adopt online shopping. This happened, among other things, through the application of strategies that incited the creation of accounts and adoption of the Privilege card. Axial’s approach was able to address challenges when the basic Shopify interface didn’t adequately the company’s needs.

The Groupe Marie Claire team can now focus on growing its online sales and developing effective marketing strategies.

What the project team had to say

“The search for a partner was based on three essential criteria for us: easy to communicate and exchange, demonstrate a technological expertise and have the capacity to start and deliver the project quickly. Axial quickly stood out for each of these criteria, which made selecting them easy and natural.The overhaul of the four sites was managed simultaneously. The challenges and obstacles were clearly identified at the beginning of the project. Every effort was made to resolve them and to achieve our goals without surprises and pain.”

Martin Bertrand, Director of E-commerce at Groupe Marie Claire

"It was a project full of great challenges! Working with four banners simultaneously, even with all their similarities, always required striking the right balance between respecting each individual brand and maximizing reuse. To work on the front-end of the site, the development team was able to innovate by creating a tool that enabled us to reflect changes common to the four banners all at once—all while providing the flexibility to apply unique touches to each brand. On the back-end side, we collaborated from Day 1 with the Dynamixware supplier to ensure connectivity between Business Central and Shopify. Communication from all teams was essential in order to deliver a finished product that met the project’s initial requirements."

Michael, Backend Analyst and Developer

Key takeaways

Product management, from images to descriptions, including prices, variants and inventory, is created and editable in the same place for the four company sites.
The sites represent four different brand images, but have the same Shopify theme.
Navigation, product sheets and the presentation of information on the sites has been simplified in order to better support target customers in their online purchases.
The digital maturity of each persona was less developed. It was therefore necessary to keep this aspect in mind throughout the design of the sites in order to build them according to their needs and expectations.

Work's extent

Strategy

Analytics
Comparative analysis
Technical, content and SEO audits
Conversion rate optimization strategy (CRO)

Creative

Design for growth and conversion
User experience (UX) design
User interface (UI) design

Development

E-commerce site development
Systems integration and automation
Website migration
Quality assurance
Performance optimization

Digital marketing

Conversion rate optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Migrate four online stores from Magento to Shopify by integrating the Microsoft Business Central ERP

The client and the challenges

Our objectives

The solutions

Key takeaways

Work's extent

Other success stories