Context
Business France is a French state agency created in 2015. Its role is to support the international exportation of French companies and to encourage foreign investments in France. Business France proposes services and advice to companies in the exportation field, from prospection of foreign markets and to searching for commercial partners.
Previously, Business France owned three distinct marketplaces: “Food”, “Wine & Spirit”, “Cosmetics”.
The platform’s success. Calculated based on personalised KPI’s, is reached through numbers of connections (and therefore potential orders).
Customer’s request
Clever Age has accompanied Business France in deployment of its marketplace by accentuating simplicity and confidence. The goal was to regroup the three marketplaces into one in order to optimise the presence of the French and foreign companies on the e-Commerce platforms. Business France wishes to support French EPT/SMB/ETI by offering them access to new informational, accompaniment and business creator tools to facilitate the exportation of French products.
Project description
Between June and December 2023, several key stages were carried out:
- Qualification stage, also known as design phase, allowed to define the product objective and highlight the requirements of the project.
Through 12 technical and functional workshops, Clever Age accompanied Business France from architecture to redirecting plan.
- Writing backlog user stories (user scenario) allowed to put into order and prioritise functionalities to develop, both front and back. 3 week scrum sprints were set up in scrum format, with 4 classic ceremonies: sprint planning, daily, sprint review and retrospective.
- UI/UX conception was led by Jaune, Clever Age’s communication agency, thus contributing to a fluid and modern customer experience. Very sensible to mobile first, Jaune delivered complete and complex models to the customer, all while respecting the accessibility notions.
- Developments were divided in six sprints with a methodical and iterative approach. Each sprint allowed progress incrementally to the final goals of the project, thus ensuring efficient time and resource management. They concluded with an accessibility audit.
- Specific developments were also undertaken to meet specific project requirements, thus ensuring precise adaptation to the specific needs of Business France.
- Finally, the recovery of product, buyer and seller data was a crucial step, allowing a smooth transition to the new system and preserving the continuity of essential information for the project. In view of the large volume of data, Clever Age pushed for a step-by-step recovery, spread over several weeks.
Realisation of this project had several objectives:
- Move all Business France marketplaces to Adobe Commerce Cloud and Mirakl
- Increase the overall visibility of the sectors proposed by Business France and facilitate the creation of new universes.
- Make connections between sellers and buyers simple and intuitive
- Serve as a content platform to increase the visibility of Business France activities
- Implement reports and performance indicators (KPIs) to simplify the extraction of essential data for Business France, in particular
- Facilitate the exhibition of event activities, offering buyers and sellers the opportunity to sign in to it
- Have a modern and scalable platform both technologically and ergonomically
- Simplify the onboarding of sellers and buyers through custom homepages
Business France has received continuous support from Clever Age all along the project, benefiting from experts’ advice to overcome challenges, notably in what concerned user interface (UI/UX), architecture, respect of norms and specific development and functionalities.
Clever Age acted as an intermediary between different stakeholders of the project, ensuring an efficient communication and coordination between Adobe, Mirakl and Neper (for the aspects SEO-related aspects)
Observed results
The customer showed to be fully satisfied and expressed their gratitude on several occasions for the accomplished work and commitment of Clever Age teams in achieving the given objectives.
Three particularly outstanding milestones were achieved with success:
- September 2023: platform presentation to the office operators overseas
- November 2023: platform presentation to the General Manager of Business France
- December 2023: official launch of the platform in the Mirakl premises in the presence of Adobe’s General Manager, Mirakl’s General Manager and Olivier Becht, Minister Delegate in charge of Foreign Trade, Attractiveness and French people abroad.
“Dare to Export” in a few words:
Marketplace is one of the composants of the “Dare to Export” program, in which Clever Age actively participates. This program will offer companies distinguished by Osez l’Export and presenting strong export potential, personalised assistance from the France Export Team (750 advisors abroad and a network of partners referenced in more than 50 countries to enable its international establishment to be successful). Companies will have the opportunity to benefit from all the export support services provided by the TFE at a cost reduced by 50% for the period 2023-2026.
”Business France selected Clever Age for their project of replatforming three e-commerce websites into one, Marketplace Business France. We searched for a flexible and human-sized partner that has expertise and capacities necessary to take charge of a long and complex project. Clever Age was able to adapt to the constraints or the organisation and deliver a product that meets the expectations. They intervened in the qualification stage and UX/UI dimensions, took charge of front developments and of integration of Adobe Commerce and Mirakl technologies, as well as the recovery of data in the transition phase. The working relationship is simple and direct, which doesn’t spoil anything! ”
Pierre Wellhoff, E-commerce Manager of Business France
