Wall Art Prints is an online art retailer and gallery, with the goal of brightening up every customer’s home while supporting local artists. The company provides beautiful yet affordable artwork, with over 20,000 prints available in a variety of styles, sizes and materials.

Using only the highest quality Australian-made materials with discounted prices across the full range, they hope to make art more affordable. As a strictly e-commerce store, Wall Art Prints is able to reduce running costs, passing the savings on to their customers without compromising quality.

Having found success in the Australian market, Wall Art Prints was looking for an effective way to scale up their business, bringing their art to the international market. They hoped to launch multiple online stores that feature local artists’ work in their collection. However, building a store based on their current platform (CS-Cart) that is capable of handling and accommodating multiple countries would have been out of the question.

As their online store is their sole sales channel, it was important to offer customers a proper representation of how the art work would appear so they could make an informed decision, especially when shipping overseas.

ENTERING NEW MARKETS
From their initial Australian store, new storefronts have been designed and configured ready for the new markets that the brand aims to enter. Magento 2 was capable of laying the foundation for accelerating the launch of Wall Art Prints, as setting up and configuring multiple storefronts for each market is a complex venture.

Magento’s flexibility came into force when developing the new store. It allowed for more leniency in creating experiences that are local to each market while following their unique tax laws and legislation. A CDN was used as a key part of this infrastructure, utilized to better distribute data, speed up connections and create more consistency between stores worldwide.

FOSTER CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Wall Art Prints wanted to create a platform for artists to sell their art through the new website. With this B2B2C model, Wall Art Prints is not only able to provide their customers across different markets much more choice and variety, but also enables them to easily connect with customers of the new market by offering local artworks on the website.

To enable this, a custom marketplace system was developed based on the Magento platform. An intuitive vendor portal was designed and developed, allowing artists to upload their artwork, along with its description, tags and price, while also being able to track inventory and sales. Finally, a payments system was developed that enables the sellers to check and receive their payments and commission from the website.

IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
To help customers envision the finished products realistically, a system was developed to manipulate images into different styles to reflect the different printing materials by bringing these images into Cloudinary.

Eway, an intuitive payment gateway, was connected with the website providing customers with a variety of payment methods. Algolia Search was also used, favored for its speed and personalization capabilities.

GOING FORWARD
In the future, Wall Art Prints will be launching in more countries, as well as migrating their Australian website into the new Magento Commerce platform. SmartOSC continues to provide support for Wall Art Prints to help maintain high quality experiences for customers.