Ilicut: a new e-commerce site and custom Business Intelligence

Founded in 2009 in Burgundy, La Boutique du bois specializes in producing customizable solid wood panels in custom shapes and sizes. Today, the brand is looking to expand internationally. To do so, it is rebranding as Ilicut and starting over, scrapping its old e-commerce platform, which had become outdated and hard to maintain. It turned to Synolia to modernize its site and implement a powerful sales analytics tool. We proposed an e-commerce solution that supports highly specific development, a prepackaged Business Intelligence solution for e-commerce, and a customer service solution…

The challenge

Handle highly specific product management, with very detailed configuration options, down to custom cutting dimensions and shapes. And make it possible to analyze sales of these made-to-measure products!

Our answer

For e-commerce: Sylius, of course! The solution offers a technical foundation that is easy to extend with custom development and easy to evolve. It adapts to the project and makes it possible to build a clean architecture without bending the tool.

For Business Intelligence: Qlik Cloud, with our prepackaged e-commerce offering, which covers most online sales monitoring needs out of the box while adapting to each site’s specifics. A lower-cost offering that can be deployed quickly, as soon as the site goes live!

For customer service: Zendesk, and its ability to centralize requests, so teams can respond efficiently to customer inquiries.

Project milestones:

E-commerce requirements workshops • Detailed specifications • Sylius implementation and custom development using an agile methodology • Qlik Cloud implementation and custom development • Zendesk implementation and configuration • Ongoing Sylius onboarding training • Qlik Cloud onboarding training

Project highlights:

• A configurator for made-to-measure panels
• Integration with the Qlik Business Intelligence tool
• Integration with the Zendesk customer service platform
• Integration with Avis Vérifié for customer reviews
• Integration with Divalto, the brand’s ERP
• A custom integration with Reforest’Action, offering customers the option to plant a tree when they place an order
• An inspiration section showcasing customer projects

Our Digital eXperience Platform approach for Ilicut

Ilicut’s Sylius e-commerce platform is now connected to the Qlik Cloud solution, enabling the company and its teams to track sales of panels, wood countertops and other products (desk legs, varnishes, oils, etc.) easily and accurately. The prepackaged dashboards and KPIs for online retailers include product-specific concepts to analyze the best-selling wood species, quantities in square and cubic meters, the share of professional versus individual customers…

The platform is also integrated with the Zendesk customer service management tool to automatically retrieve every request submitted through the contact form. Once submitted, requests are centralized in Zendesk and handled by the appropriate team depending on the need.

The results

The new Sylius e-commerce platform allows Ilicut to eliminate its technical debt and move to a high-performing, scalable solution suited to managing a specific product catalog. In addition, new features such as the configurator and the inspiration section make the customer journey easier and smoother all the way to checkout. Finally, integrating the Cloud version of the Qlik Business Intelligence tool provides much more granular sales insight. Static reporting is a thing of the past: e-commerce teams can now analyze sales and customers in a dynamic, in-depth and sophisticated way. And thanks to Zendesk, customer service teams are more efficient!