Kitchen Things

Platform

BigCommerce

SERVICES

Customer Journey Mapping, Data Driven UX & UI, Platform Implementation, Systems Architecture

CLIENT INDUSTRY

Appliances , Retail

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 20 retail appliance stores.
The team at Kitchen Things worked with Overdose to 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.

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Integrations

Overdose created a custom integration between BigCommerce and Akeneo, allowing Kitchen things to streamline the management of product information, promotions and content within a single administration interface. The site serves up store-level inventory, AI driven product & content search, and integrated customer service and chat tools and leverages Shogun which allows the marketing team to simply create new campaign landing pages through the WYSIWYG page designer.

Challenges

CHALLENGE #001

Custom Promo Engine

Kitchen Things had custom promotional requirements to align with in-store promotions which are changed almost daily. The site is also used as a catalog for in-store browsing by staff and customers.

SOLUTION

Overdose created a Custom Promo engine built within Akeneo that syncs to BigCommerce, allowing for central administration of promotions which are then updated across all channels.

CHALLENGE #002

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 omni-channel 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.

CHALLENGE #003

Custom Checkout Functionality

Due to a supplier arrangement, 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 payment gateway required based on the products in the cart. This then sends customers to one of two integrated payment gateways.

CHALLENGE #004

Akeneo / BigCommerce Integration

Kitchen Things required Akeneo to remain the administration interface for inventory management and promotions which is used company-wide, therefore requiring custom integration with Akeneo and BigCommerce.

SOLUTION

Overdose custom-developed an integration application to facilitate the bi-directional flow of information from Akeneo into BigCommerce, allowing Akeneo to remain as the central control of pricing and promotions across the store network, while reducing manual processes and duplication of tasks.

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UX/UI

As part of the UX/UI ideation, we identified the need for a structured Mega Menu which 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.