The Hour Glass wanted to enchant their customers with the unique shopping experience. On the occasion of the global launch of the NOMOS Glashütte collection, they launched exquisite online pop-up store leveraging Vue Storefront framework.
The NOMOS Glashütte “Red Dot” Capsule Collection 2018 is a series of thoughtfully designer and exceptionally decorated watches. The Hour Glass, the global retailer of the luxury watches, present the full collection in the designated online pop-up store on the 27th September 2018.
The online pop-up store is essentially a full-fledged point-of-sale platform, the site showcases the heritage and design inspiration of NOMOS watches. Combined with hi-res imagery and intuitive design, the pop-up store is intended to mirror the level of consideration and customer-centricity of The Hour Glass offline boutiques.
“We’ve designed the customer journey to be as seamless as possible. Upon selecting and purchasing their desired “Red Dot” Tangente watch (via debit or credit card), customers will receive a verification e-mail and personalized customer service should they have any issues relating to shipping or payment. “ – Bao Nguyen, The Hour Glass
Customer-centric PWA frontend framework
Having customers on 5 continents, The Hour Glass is well-attuned to online shopping experiences. The choice of a customer-centric PWA frontend framework was essential to provide:
- most engaging interactions from button clicks to enter a new page,
- convenience of viewing the site, placing orders and entering credit card details without being susceptible to intermitted in 4G connections,
- best-in-class loading speed.
Vue Storefront framework stood out as a clear choice given its integration with Magento 2 Commerce.
Vue Storefront PWA customization
The Hour Glass conducted the whole implementation in-house. Vue Storefront is relatively elastic and the developer’s team used it to create custom-built features integrated with the online pop-up store. Customization included the following areas:
- Frontend in particular – brand story page, product details page, magnifiable gallery, single page checkout, FAQ page, and implemented mobile responsive web design.
- An extension to display images based on product attributes.
- Stripe integration to securely transmit orders and credit card details, and to trigger the anti-fraud 3DS feature.
- Secure extension to push orders from VS into Magento 2, ensuring orders are captured in M2.
- A new feature for price display, based on a central pricing table.
- An extension to ensure orders are properly captured and mapped to the SCO page, which in turn triggers the Stripe payment process.
- Middle layer to integrate with a global logistics provider allowing the airway bill to be generated without manual input.
- Integration with Gtag, FB Pixel, InterCom.
Throughout the implementation process, The Hour Glass was supported by Vue Storefront core contributors from the Divante team.
“The team at Vue Storefront has been extremely helpful and responsive to our inquiries on building custom features and assisting on our debugging request, along with every step of the development process.” – Bao Nguyen, The Hour Glass
All the customizations mentioned above were completed within a 3-week sprint.
Significant implementation considerations
During the design phase, The Hour Glass team have debated what addresses better its sophisticated personas: multi-step/page checkout flow or a single page checkout form with shipping fees and order summary and presented on one glance. After undergoing a series of in-person user-ability study of clients, and their hypothesis was validated – the single view is less confusing to customers as opposed to multiple page execution.
Even on mobile, a single page scroll experience is also more seamless.
The team also had to decide between implementing heavy customization of the gallery view and interaction or allocate time to focus on other aspects. Despite the intensive 3 weeks, the dedicated team not only coded it but also refined the order summary slider. Copy and stylistics enhancements were also made up until the last min preceding go-live at 9 pm SG time on 27th Sep 2018.
To assist visitors in registering their interest and be the first to know of campaign launches, a custom chatbot prompting visitors to answer qualifying questions including their details and how they came to know of the collection, was also implemented. This has also lead to a good number of leads.
Performance of the NOMOS pop-up store
The NOMOS “Red Dot” Capsule Collection 2018 online pop-up store has been widely covered by including the foremost international watch media of Hodinkee and Revolution Watches as well as Esquire. Although priced at SGD$ 2,991 (~ USD$ 2,179) without taxes, significantly higher than the average basket size of online purchases, significant sales clocked during the first few days was in line with expectations commensurate of limited edition launches.
Watches are still being ordered by customers worldwide. To date, purchases have come from and watches shipped to US, UK, UAE, JP, AU, HK in addition to Singapore.
Visit the store at nomosreddot.thehourglass.com
Learn more about Vue Storefront
Published November 29, 2018
