Kitchen Things

Platform

Adobe Commerce

SERVICES

Applications & Extensions, Automation & Segmentation, Campaign Management, Marketing, Platform Implementation, Reporting & Attribution, Strategy, Technology

Kitchen Things New Zealand is a culmination of industry-pioneering milestones and an intergenerational passion for premium, innovative kitchen experiences. Kitchen Things was created as the specialist in premium European cooking appliances. Driven by their family values, they are passionate about empowering you in the kitchen; their complimentary cooking technology demonstrations, expert advice and a broad range of quality products ensure your appliance selection perfectly fits your needs.

Kitchen Things understand that your new home or renovated space should be as practical and functional as it is beautiful. They also believe that choosing new appliances and creating your dream space should be stress-free, exciting and ultimately enhance your lifestyle. So, they prioritise outstanding products and harness the latest technologies to show you what is possible and to find the right solutions for your home.

Their premium appliances are carefully selected for their exceptional quality, cutting-edge technology, longevity and sophistication at competitive prices. They pride themselves on their customer support from inspiration to informed buying choices to delivery, installation and ongoing service.

As a nationally recognised kitchen specialist, Kitchen Things offer a complete range of premium kitchen appliance brands including Miele, Smeg, ASKO, Gaggenau, Neff, and Bosch, plus many more through their family-owned-and-operated network of nationwide retail appliance stores.

The team at Kitchen Things worked with Overdose. to firstly, conceptualise and create a commerce-enabled website to complement their customer's multi-touchpoint buying journey and support in-store sales staff through a full-funnel approach to marketing and tech. Additionally, Overdose. was tasked with migrating Kitchen Things from their BigCommerce site to Adobe Commerce Cloud to complement their customer's multi-touchpoint buying journey and support in-store sales staff through a full-funnel approach to marketing and tech.

Integrations

As part of this project, Overdose. integrated the Adobe Commerce platform with Akeneo, Kitchen Things' Product Information Management (PIM) tool, using the Akeneo connector Magento module to sync product data and categories.

Customisations to the connector's default logic were required to:
1. Ensure the backorder functionality is enabled or disabled based on the custom product availability status logic.
2. Ensure that the branch-specific stock data is synced to MSI sources rather than the regular product attribute.

Kitchen Things is a reseller of Miele appliances. To streamline the fulfilment process for Miele purchases Overdose. implemented an order integration that posts the order directly to Miele via the Miele API once it has been placed. To ensure that there are no price inconsistencies at purchase the price for Miele products is validated via the Miele API and updated if not aligned.

The site also boasts a bespoke Algolia implementation with custom indexes to make all content across the site from products, categories, CMS pages, and blog posts searchable.

The site also utilises the powerful personalisation tool Nosto to provide targeted product recommendations to users based on their behaviour or purchasing history.

Challenges

CHALLENGE #001

General platform limitations

Kitchen Things wanted to develop complex features for their site so needed a flexible platform to enable them to do so.

SOLUTION

The existing Kitchen Things B2C website was migrated from BigCommerce to Adobe Commerce Cloud.

CHALLENGE #002

An increased need to support B2B customers

B2B customers required more support and ability to manage their purchases for projects.

SOLUTION

The Adobe Commerce B2B module was installed to utilise the Requisition List module. Requisition lists, in comparison to a wishlist, provide a better solution for customers who are shopping based on lists of products for projects. Every logged-in user can set up requisition lists for projects and add this list of products to the cart directly from the list. Customers can maintain multiple lists.

CHALLENGE #003

Migration of blog posts into Adobe Commerce

Blog posts/recipes were housed in a separate WordPress site so The Jones Family Business has to manage 2 separate platforms.

SOLUTION

Existing blog posts/recipes were migrated from Wordpess to Magento to allow The Jones Family Business to manage all content through a single platform.

CHALLENGE #004

Custom Checkout Functionality

Due to a supplier arrangement, the Kitchen Things site required two unique payment portals depending on which suppliers' products are in the cart. This required custom attributes to be defined in Akeneo for custom cart logic to define the checkout flow the user is guided down.

SOLUTION

Custom logic is used to determine the payment gateway required based on the products in the cart. This then sends customers to one of two integrated payment gateways.

CHALLENGE #005

Retailing High-Value Appliances Online

The appliance industry is traditionally heavily geared towards bricks-and-mortar, therefore the old Kitchen Things site was primarily to support in-store activity, rather than as a revenue-generating channel itself due to the high value nature of the products sold.

SOLUTION

Overdose. was tasked to define an intuitive online User Experience that complements the omnichannel shopping and browsing behaviours of customers, allowing for deeper customer engagement, data capture and targeting capability. Through deep ERP and PIM integration, the site serves up store-level inventory, AI-driven product & content search, and integrated customer service and chat tools.

"Overdose. undertook the task of migrating our antiquated BigCommerce site to Magento 2/Adobe Commerce, this was a well-documented and carefully planned process.

Overdose.'s team from the designers, project managers and developers all worked together to help us create a unified vision of our new website as well as the future state versions. The teams were agile and able to adapt to any minor adjustments, issues and requirements we had while keeping development running smoothly.

Everyone here at Kitchen Things / Jones Family Business has been astonished by the final result, and even more excited by the future possibilities that are available with this new platform."

Josef Arnet, Ecommerce Manager
- Jones Family Business

UX/UI

As part of the UX/UI ideation, we identified the need for a structured Mega Menu that could support the dynamically-pulled content including products, categories and promotions from Akeneo. The multi-tiered Mega Menu allows the user to easily navigate different types of products from anywhere on the website without having to go through a maze of filters and category pages like most competitor websites. The UX includes well-considered touchpoints to support the customer buying journey, such as surfacing inventory availability in hover states.

Our next big consideration was the B2B aspect of the business, we identified that there was a need for the ability to create requisition lists and a re-order functionality in order to create a seamless re-purchasing experience for trade customers. The user had the ability to create or add products to their already existing requisitions lists as early on in their journey as the category page. Giving the user this ability so early on in their journey meant we were reducing the number of clicks the user had to go through in order to purchase, this is especially useful for those customers who know what they want, and need to get it done quickly.

Help and support from an online business is crucial, especially when buying big-ticket items that need careful consideration when finding the right product for you. Kitchen things wanted to cater to all audiences when providing their help and support services, especially those who were unable to make it in-store to talk to their appliance experts before purchasing their appliances. This offered an extremely personable service when the online customers were able to talk to one of their real-life appliance experts virtually. To give this feature the attention it deserved, we made sure to call it out at every touch point throughout the user journey within content blocks, throughout the home page, category page and products pages, as well as providing dedicated support pages that are easily accessible to all users.

The ability to send your wish list to your nearest / chosen Kitchen Things store was another great feature we implemented to elevate their help and support services, the user is able to send their wish list through, then a sales assistant will then call them back to discuss all options available as well as pricing options, this assisted in creating a direct connection between the customer and the sales assistant, amplifying their customer support to the next level.

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