Robopolis: e-commerce website redesign and customer relationship management with Magento and SugarCRM

Robopolis is an online store selling robotics products (since acquired by iRobot). In 2007, the company was led by Bruno Bonnel, a renowned web entrepreneur, who decided in 2010 to step up a gear and overhaul a web architecture that was showing its age.

Robopolis approached Synolia with a very broad set of needs, given its product range and the diversity of its target audiences. The Robopolis catalog ranges from robot vacuums sold to consumers to intelligent robots (Génibo and other companion robots) for researchers, universities and top schools…

The project also involved building a global architecture in which the business could be managed from a high-performance customer relationship management platform connected to the e-commerce solution. Synolia and Robopolis quickly concluded that a Magento platform linked to a SugarCRM application was the obvious choice.

Work on the platform began in May 2010, with go-live six months later. The Magento architecture was set up first, with a new visual identity, and then the SugarCRM connection was built to synchronize information between the two platforms.

Since then, Robopolis has kept growing its business, and the solution is regularly enhanced to optimize processes. The project helped Robopolis strengthen its leadership in robotics, in a fast-growing market.

Context and challenges

• Fully redesign the e-commerce website, ready to scale internationally or even to multiple stores
• Gain a customer tracking and profiling tool
• Improve after-sales service
• Address every customer need (B2B/B2C)
• Capitalize on the strong growth of a promising market

The proposed solution

• Website redesign on the Magento e-commerce platform, multilingual and multi-store
• A new visual identity & development of custom modules, such as the accounting export of orders
• Deployment of a SugarCRM platform to synchronize customers, orders and customer requests, enabling targeted analysis of Robopolis customers and their buying habits, and an efficient customer service.

Connecting SugarCRM allows Robopolis to synchronize all information from the e-commerce website into a powerful, efficient CRM tool. The CRM platform analyzes customer behavior and builds customer profiles to offer products that fit their needs ever more closely. The SugarCRM application is also an excellent tool for managing and monitoring the business.

Finally, the customer portal set up between SugarCRM and Magento makes it possible to handle information and support requests efficiently and to give customers value-added information, directly in their online customer account.

For more information about our e-commerce/CRM integration solutions, explore our dedicated section or contact us!