Trilix

“Managing our catalog and ensuring accurate data across our systems is critically important. P2M has helped to ensure that our Akeneo system and the integration to Magento is not only functional but easy to manage, maintain and grow with our catalog.”
Mike Schuler, President

Schuler Shoes

Looking back at a 130 year old company history, Schuler Shoes today is a thriving family-run business success story. The founder, Vincent Schuler, opened the first Schuler Shoes store in 1889 and the vision today is to “improve lives - one person, one pair, one neighborhood at a time”. Since then, nine stand-alone shoe stores have opened their doors in Minnesota in the United States. The growing number of satisfied customers proves the endurability of this traditional customer-centered business model. In times of high competition with shopping malls and discounters seizing more and more space in the city centers, customers still choose a personalized shopping experience at Schuler Shoes over inadequate consulting and an oversupply of random products.

Being guided to always realizing the core values of customer service and offering an extensive selection of comfortable shoes, Schuler Shoes reaches out to provide the accustomed shopping experience of their customers also in an online store environment.

Collaboration

For many online shop operators like Schuler Shoes establishing a smooth interconnection between the Magento store platform and the Akeneo PIM system is one of the biggest time and cost factors. After having struggled with using a different solution at the beginning that, however, resulted only in unexpected service and maintenance costs but still no stable seamless integration between Magento and Akeneo, Schuler Shoes opted for another approach. Having found out that Trilix has developed the P2M extension that can be easily integrated via API and was designed to solve exactly the synchronization issues between the two systems, Schuler Shoes decided to choose Trilix as their solution and service partner. Sharing the same customer and business values, soon a satisfying, reliable and trustworthy collaboration emerged between the two companies. Finally having found the shoe that fits, Schuler Shoes extended the collaboration with Trilix from the initial implementation of P2M to a long-term full service support for their Akeneo installation.

The Challenge

A brief overview of the product data range Schuler Shoes is managing with Magento and Akeneo reveals an enormous maintenance effort. Over half a million products including product models and variations with a great amount of reference data attributes and more than sixty thousand assets are already challenging to organize in Akeneo. Even more caution and time needs to be invested to validate and ensure the accuracy and quality of the published product data within the Magento store instance. Being aware of the entailed difficulties Trilix took up the challenges and used the full range of possibilities of the P2M extension to tackle the obstacles of data inconsistencies, intransparent and unpredictable data exchange processes as well as error-prone synchronizations that naturally come with product catalogs of this size.

Our Solution

In order to guarantee a robust and transparent product data delivery process from Akeneo to Magento the P2M extension was implemented into the existing system setup. When before a large amount of manual time had to be invested in validating and cleaning up the data in Magento after it was directly imported from Akeneo without any rectification of the differing data structures, the Schuler Shoes catalog editors now work with the user-friendly interface that comes with P2M and decide what data changes should be sent to Magento before the data is transmitted and published on the online store website.

Time can be saved and data curation enhanced because P2M automatically validates the data structure consistency and only displays the critical results, including concrete errors in product descriptions and identified duplicate categories. Notifications point out data that is held back until fixed and prevent faulty data from being published. Moreover, P2M works on an editing-based approach for synchronizing Magento data with changes made within Akeneo. That means additions, changes and deletions are detected within product descriptions, categories, attributes and options within Akeneo, including even large amounts of data for reference attributes, and only those are delivered to the Magento store platform. As a result the P2M extension can account for any complexity and volume of the data catalog and ensures that no outdated information will be published.

The eCommerce Stack

eCommerce platform: Magento Enterprise 2.3
PIM system: Akeneo Enterprise 2.3 (Cloud Edition)

Features

Integration of Magento and Akeneo with P2M integration extension API
Automatic data validation
Easy harmonization of reference attributes data
Pre-editing of faulty data before publication
Inherent catalog data consistency between Magento and Akeneo