Online Tailoring Store: Custom Magento 2 Development

E-Commerce has touched almost every industry known to the world with apparels being one of the leading contributors. Shopify through Statista claims that the apparel industry revenue is single-handedly expected to rise from $481.2 billion in 2018 to $712.9 billion by the year 2022.

Having said that, the leading e-commerce giants find apparels as an important category to generate huge revenues.

But ready-made costumes never come in one-fit-all sizes and there is a reason why “Tailor-made” is the synonym for “Perfection”.

Several E-Commerce websites like IndoChino took up the challenge to commercialize tailoring at the Online platform where users can ship their costumes with measurements. The other side delivers them a perfectly shaped piece keeping in eye the measurements being asked for.

Our expert Magento 2 developers had a great opportunity working for our clients who were in dire need of an online tailoring store to scale their business.

What does the Clothing Alterations website do?

The client is already known to offer tailoring services in the locality. To expand their business and enhance their customer reach, they approached us for developing a web portal that offers services and manages the entire process online. The basic idea was to provide the user with a range of clothing modifications with admin-controlled prices and meanwhile managing the shipment of the cloth between the points.

The following GIF gives us a brief tour of the workflow from a customer’s view:

Here the user can be seen selecting the section for the dress and adding the customizations. The user is instructed to add pins with illustrative images and videos.

The measurements added while attaching pins are passed on to the tailor. Once the order is confirmed, it is the tailor’s part to deal with the rest. However, the Shipping part is where we had to work on.

Below are the tasks past the order confirmation:

Step a: The cloth is picked up from the customer’s home and delivered to the tailor

Step b: The tailor makes the desired changes

Step c: The shipment company home-delivers the clothes back to the customer

The customers can either opt to drop the clothes by themselves or take help of the shipment services whose cost vary with the customer’s location.

Features of the Magento Online Tailoring store

The Online Tailoring store implied online management of anything and everything related to tailoring. The processes involved and the steps to streamline them offered a lot of friction. The challenges involved and the probable approach to sort them needed a profound strategy and thus, the right features to be served.

The Front-end features are highly user-friendly while collecting the right info about the tasks. The Admin Panel at the back end offers easy management options that allow the owner to handle prices, customization and shipment on the website.

Following are a few of the major features in our custom online Tailoring store:

Custom Theme development on Magento 2

Our Client was highly interested to have the website created on Magento for its wide customization ability. Our expert developers designed an entirely personalized theme for the clients keeping in mind the essential functions and how they serve.

Being offered enough room for Product customization development by Magento 2, it was easier for our developers to implement the right functionalities at the right place. Added to that was the ease to have them all integrated making the store work smoother.

The core theme is highly responsive, letting the users access it on multiple devices without grappling with the site contents.

Categories for custom clothes

The world is full of varieties and assortments, costumes have even more. To make things simpler for the user’s ends, we added every major variety offered by the ready-made clothing industry.

Users can add their ready-made clothes to an appropriate category, thereby receiving the right guidelines.

The men can ask for alterations in the following:-

-> Shirts

-> Shorts

-> Suit Jacket

-> Outer Wear

-> Pants

The women’s section offers more options than men’s. We can see the sub-categories here:

Custom option for clothes lying beyond the pre-defined categories

While we have added the major categories of clothes, few costumes will still fall out of the options. The Custom option allows the user to consider such clothes with ease.

We added a custom form that allows the customers to add information about the clothes and the desired clothing alterations in details including the measurements, like the sleeves, the shirt length and more. Along with the descriptions, users can drag-drop multiple images about their cloth in the space provided.

Pinning to add marks for cloth customization

The users have to add pins to their clothes while it is picked up, to mark the desired alterations. For the same, measurements are taken and shared with the tailor. The Pin Button guides the user to fix the pins right with the help of short and long videos.

Users can also take the help of the Step-by-Step guidance that follows the video parts.

Saving Measurements for further clothing alterations

It was equally important for us to understand the long term needs of the users, their flexibility and ease of usage every time they reach out for alteration. Saving their measurements reduces the task for the user as well as the Admin to meet deadlines. The tailors can receive the measurements details directly from the Admin Panel, wherefrom they can make the desired alterations with much ease.

The users, on the other hand, are saved from taking the same measurements in the future.

The users are given the authority to save multiple labels, which they can edit or delete any time. “More options” at the bottom allows the user to add more customizable attributes along with the corresponding length. The measurements can be saved or deleted from this section.

A separate B2B section to unlock better growth possibilities

It goes without saying that B2B plays an eminent role in the success of any e-commerce business. We have thus visibly parted this section from the very start. The option is placed at the front screen to allow users to locate their desired page faster.

B2B owners are always looking to add in new business partners who can help expand the business reach, in turn, bringing in extended opportunity on increasing sales and revenue. So, special pricing is offered to them as they can bring in 100s and 1000s of order in a short span of time.

Technologies used for the Online Tailoring Store

-> Magento 2 is often the first choice for business owners looking for unique options that offer an extraordinary shopping experience to their customers. The e-commerce platform giant supports unique requirements with perfection. We were given a PSD file by the clients, and we created a pixel by pixel matching theme from PSD to Magento.

-> jQuery had a major role in making the UI more interactive and quickening the functionalities. The Javascript Toolkit based helped to customize the price as the customer adds new options.

We have used AJAX to sync the front end and the back-end, which is well handled by the jQuery.

-> Twilio API is used for message-alerts related to the progressions.

Allowing the Admin to add Videos in the Pin

This was one of the major challenges on the way to developing our online Clothing alteration app. The list of customization tends to grow with time. Affixing the list along with the corresponding videos seemed quite unworkable here. We had to come up with a solution where the Admin could add Custom options and media with zero hassle in the future.

We introduced the customization options as paid products here. At the back-end, every customization is allotted a unique SKU. AJAX helps to match the product name with the SKU code thereby allowing users to add their videos. The synchronization allows the added media to the page front.

Managing Self Drop off and Pickup

It was important for us to manage the process where users drop the clothes by themselves to tailors while enabling them to have a track of the progress as well.

Our developers custom-designed the Admin Panel that allows the owner to confirm the arrival and dispatching of products at their centres. Custom-built buttons allow them to control these tasks with much ease.

The user can thereby opt for Free Shipping option at the bottom to proceed with. The option is mentioned as Zero priced service in the backend to exclude it from any possible charges.

A message service powered by Twilio API auto generates confirmation text to the user. We leave that option to the users to choose between SMS and Email as the media for receiving notifications.

Clothes Pickup and drop by the Shipment

The users can take help of the paid shipping option offered by the store owners. They can choose service type from the options that include:

-> Priority Mail

-> Parcel Select

-> Priority Mail Express

The biggest challenge was to channelise the two-way shipping with a one time call, which was beyond the reach of any third party plugin

To manage Shipments and the extra charges involved, we took the help of Shippo Integration which is a Magento based Plugin available in Magento Store.

As the business model involved two-way transportation of the product, we had to modify the actual pricing of the third party services. The pricing was doubled from our backend and then added to the shipping options.

The shipment API receives the only call in the process when opted from the front end. The additional shipping charges leverage twice the charge involved in one-sided transportation.

In the example, we can see an auto-generated price under Shipping & Handling costing $22.44. The actual one-way price could be $11.22 and it is hidden from the customer.

Final Words on Custom Clothing Alterations website

There is a say, ”If Knowledge is the treasure, Practice is the Key”. And, we have both.

Developing the Magento based custom online tailoring store offered great challenges at every step. But years of experience at understanding roots and branches of E-commerce allowed us to overcome the obstacles well.

Our Magento development company offers custom Magento 2 development services to meet the business needs of the clients. If you are looking out for an expert Magento2 Developer, you are already at the right spot.