On September 24th, 2024, we proudly unveiled the new Marina Home Progressive Web App (PWA), marking a transformative moment for the brand’s digital presence. Marina Home, a leading lifestyle decor and home furnishings brand renowned for their timeless designs and premium products that seamlessly blend modern, and contemporary styles. To better serve the brand’s diverse customer base spanning the UAE, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain, Marina Home required a sophisticated digital platform that reflects its commitment and personalized shopping experience.
From Concept To Completion: Marina Homes Pwa Implementation
At the heart of the project was the need to improve customer satisfaction, increase conversions rates, and expand market reach across multiple regions. Therefore, our core goals included:
- Enhance User Experience with a smooth device friendly platform that ensures customers have an engaging and intuitive shopping journey.
- Boost Customer Engagement by leveraging MoEngage for personalized marketing and email automation, fostering better connections with our users.
- Expand Market Reach across four regions with multilingual support, addressing both English and Arabic Audiences.
- Optimize Site Performance with fast load times and responsive design to reduce bounce rates and encourage conversions.
Drive Mobile Sales by creating a mobile-first shopping experience that is accessible and seamless, encouraging purchases from smartphones and tablets.
Key Challenges In Marina Homes’ Pwa Journey
1. Balancing Media Quality And Load Times
Marina Home’s catalog relied heavily on high-quality images and videos that showcase its luxurious and detailed designs. One of the biggest challenges was ensuring these media assets didn’t inversely impact loading speeds.
2. Creating A Multilingual And Multiregional Platform
Creating a platform that works seamlessly across multiple countries and supports different languages, specifically Arabic, which requires right-to-left text orientation- was a complex task. The platform had to be consistent and deliver localized content depending on the region.
3. Integrating 3D/AR Capabilities Without Overloading Resources
Adding 3D and AR experiences is resource-intensive. The challenge was to integrate 3D and AR capabilities without overwhelming the platform and slowing down the browsing experiences.
4. Cross-Platform Optimization
Delivering a seamless experience across all devices and platforms, across various locations was an important aspect of the brand experience. The challenge was creating and optimizing different apps for different platforms as it involved extensive troubleshooting and achieving uniformity.
Codilar’s Pioneering Solutions For Marina Homes’ Pwa Transformation
Marina Home partnered with Codilar to overhaul their existing platform and create a unique and scalable platform that meets their requirements. The goal was to develop a future-proof platform that could support Marina Homes’ growth and expansion across multiple regions, while being performance oriented and customer-centric.
Here’s how it went-
1. MoEngage For Personalized Customer Engagement
MoEngage is integrated into the PWA to enhance email automation and create personalized user journeys. With advanced data-segmentation and AI-driven analytics, Marina Home can now deliver targeted messages, recommendations, and offers based on the customers’ behaviour patterns. Key automations include abandoned cart reminders, order tracking updates, registration confirmation and engaging newsletters. This automation is critical to retention, conversion optimization and developing deeper customer relationships by ensuring that every customer interaction is relevant.
2. Gumlet for Optimized Image and Video Delivery
One of the most critical aspects of an eCommerce experience is visual performance and interaction. With Gumlet, the PWA offers optimized delivery of videos and images, ensuring faster load times without compromising on quality. This is especially important for a brand like Marina Home, where the visual appeal of the products can influence the visitor’s purchase decisions. Gumlet makes use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and image resizing to automatically adapt to the user’s device and network speed. We further included additional configurations for quality control, and caching policies to ensure seamless performance and compatibility with our existing media assets.
3. Avataar for 3D and AR Interactions
Avataar’s 3D models and AR functionality have taken the shopping experience for Marina Home’s customers to the next level by allowing them to virtually interact with the furniture and decor in their own spaces. This innovative feature helps customers visualize dimensions, fit and aesthetics, building confidence in their purchases and immensely reducing return rates. The integration of Avataar 3D encourages the viewer to explore a number of products in great detail, making their shopping experience engaging and enjoyable. This personalized and realistic product interaction set our platform apart and improved conversion rates.
4. Multilingual And Regional Adaptability
While developing the Marina Home’s PWA, we implemented a multi-store setup for UAE, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain, each with its own store view in Magento 2 to manage localized content, pricing, taxes, etc. In addition to the PWA, we also launched an iOS App to better serve mobile users.The PWA supports multilingual functionality catering to both English and Arabic speakers. For Arabic, we optimized the site to seamlessly switch layouts while maintaining a smooth user experience. The regional and the multilingual flexibility ensures that customers across diverse markets can access the products tailored to their language preferences while experiencing localized offers, delivery options, and customer support.
5. Enhanced Analytics With GA4 And GTM
For a data driven-approach to improving the platform continuously, Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Tag Manager (GTM) have been integrated into the PWA, to track and analyze user interactions and behaviours. GA4 captured detailed insights of customer engagement, with all major eCommerce events tracked via GTM. GA4’s cross-platform tracking and granular data help identify key trends, while GTM simplifies event tracking and tag management, making it easier to test and deploy new features. This setup ensures a comprehensive view of user behaviour, driving-data driven decisions for performance.
6. Performance Optimization
Ensuring high-speed performance is important for user retention and engagement. We employed several strategies to guarantee that Marina Homes’ PWA performs consistently at all times. Lazy loading for images and videos improved load times by only loading content when needed. Code optimization, including minification and splitting, kept the platform light, while caching strategies like stale-while-revalidate ensured quick load times even during content updates. Prefetching critical assets reduced latency and skeleton loading enhanced user experience. Our team further provided consistent performance monitoring utilizing the New Relic tool to optimize platform functions, troubleshoot issues, and enhance overall health of both the website and its microservices. These approaches and our 24/7 support services rendered a smooth and efficient browsing experience.
Marina Home’s new Progressive Web App is a significant leap forward in creating an immersive and user-friendly online shopping experience. With advanced technologies like MoEngage, Gumlet, and Avataar, the PWA offers a blend of personalization, performance, and interactivity that sets a new standard in the home furnishings industry. With Codilar’s Magento experts continually monitoring and improving this platform, Marina Home is committed to staying ahead of the curve, delivering luxury with a digital-first approach to customers across the Middle-East.
If you’re looking for a reliable digital commerce partner to develop high-performance eCommerce platforms and applications, Codilar is here to help. Our dedicated team of experts possess extensive knowledge and experience in delivering tailored solutions to leading brands.
Reach out to us, and let us assist you in creating a custom eCommerce solution that fuels your business growth.
