CLIENT
Finest Cuban Cigars
INDUSTRY
Vape
TECHNOLOGY
Magento
About Customer:
In 1997, the Shop of the Finest Cuban Cigars was founded with a clear mission: to supply Hong Kong with premium, top-notch Cuban cigars at the most competitive prices available.
Since they started working, the demand for their cigar products started escalating at a very fast pace, which allowed them to expand beyond the markets of Hong Kong. When we talk about today, they are proudly serving leading hotels, bars, restaurants, private clubs, shops, and cigar enthusiasts across the globe. This all is the result of their pure dedication to customer service and satisfaction. Moreover, they also offer a 100% money-back or exchange guarantee.
Their operational headquarters and warehousing facilities are currently located in Hong Kong and Switzerland. These registered warehouses are meticulously regulated by customs and relevant government authorities, plus they have all the requisite permits and licenses to manage them efficiently. Plus, when they export directly to their customers, no duties or taxes incur, ultimately enabling them to save their customer’s costs.
Behind this, over the years, they’ve had the privilege and honor of meeting huge demands and, in some cases, forming close friendships with some of the most powerful and influential individuals in the cigar industry.
Client’s Needs:
The client has requested several key requirements for their Magento website development project. First and foremost, they were looking for the upgradation of their current Magento platform from the older version 2.3.0 to the latest version Magento 2.4.4-p3 for proper optimization of codes, bug-free site, more security, and high performance. Plus, this upgrade is essential to ensure that their e-commerce site remains up-to-date and has mobile responsiveness.
Additionally, the client emphasizes the requirement to make all of the current installed and made custom-built extensions compatible with the latest versions of Magento and PHP 8.1. This compatibility is crucial for the smooth functioning of their online store and for ensuring that all their extensions continue to work seamlessly within the updated site.
Besides this, the Finest Cuban Cigars team requested the transfer of their website from the old server to a new server, following specific requirements provided by their team. This server migration was a critical part of the project, as it ensured the site’s availability, speed, and performance on the new infrastructure, thus resulting in boosting traffic, higher rank on SERP, and more conversions.
Lastly, they highlighted the need for maintenance and support tasks, particularly related to 3rd-party payment methods and other miscellaneous tasks that may arise during the development and post-upgrade phases. These maintenance tasks are essential to ensure the continued functionality of all the features, lower bounce rate, and e-commerce platform.
Furthermore, they also wanted to connect their website with GA4 by replacing the older version of Google Analytics for enhanced measurement of different events on their site, related to outbound link clicks, web searches, and other metrics related to valuable insights on buyer’s journey.
Challenges:
Challenges are a part of every project that is handled by Rock Technolabs master developers. However, our developers, being certified as an expert, tackle all the issues, as they did with this project. First, we talk about the GA4 problems; our developers found that some of the transaction data was missing as certain payment methods did not support the order confirmation page.
The next challenge was related to time when it came to transferring the Finest Cuban Cigar store from one server to another, for which we needed to run a database backup, which we achieved from a command line interface; then we prepared their new server, proceeded with all data migration, did post migration setup, URL setup, and gone through many other processes. Consequently, this task took us up to a few days.
Other problem was related to Migration because there were some errors when we were upgrading it to the Magento 2.4.4-p3, for which we decided to change the PHP version to 8.1, and then run commands related to the Magento upgrade process. The next one was related to module installation; there was an error again and again showing just after we installed a module.
Also, when we created a module for certain functionalities, but when our developer ran the command to upgrade, there were some other errors that we later solved.
Solutions:
We proudly say that our developers, with their hard work and unwavering dedication, did what was demanded by the Finest Cuban Cigars team; they upgraded the site from an older version to the latest version by following the standard procedure of upgradation that encompasses turning on the maintenance mode, taking backup of composer.json, installing the composer update plugin, updating the composer.json to the latest version, clearing cache, and many other minor tasks.
Rock Technolabs’ team of developers also added 3rd party payment gateway so there will be no issues while in the checkout process, and the buyer get different options for the transaction. Plus, we also connected other 3rd party APIs for more operational efficiency.
Additionally, our developers resolved the transaction missing issue in GA4, for which we made some changes in the backend related to payment methods settings; at the same time, we were getting some checkout errors, which were solved using Rock Technolabs checkout modules.
Besides this, in GA4 we filtered out internal traffic, and utilized the search box to analyze user behavior during particular timeframes or concerning specific conversion goals for a particular product; the developers also created custom events for tracking unique customer interactions and enabled enhanced events in GA4 to collect additional user data.
Final Result:
We believe that our client’s success is our success, and that’s why excellent customer service is always our top priority; we boldly claim that we offered the best to the Finest Cuban Cigar team, that is why now they are enjoying 82% higher performance, of all their site modules are compatible with the current version of Magento and site is full of advance features that were earlier must for user experience.
The admirable thing is, due to the great functionalities and smooth workflow in the backend and frontend, they were able to generate 102% higher revenue as compared to the revenue in their previous quarter. Plus, after analyzing the data through analytics, we can say that they are getting 49% more customers every month.
