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EXPERTISE.
Audit and consulting, international deployment, Magento migration, maintenance, and improvements.
TECHNLOGY.
Magento
FIELD.
Industry
France’s leading optical retailer.
Alain Afflelou is a French company specialising in the sale of prescription glasses and contact lenses. Founded in 1972 by Alain Afflelou, its headquarters are now based in Mérignac in the south of France. The brand is also present in two key markets — France and Spain — as well as in around fifteen countries across Europe and Latin America. Afflelou is today one of the most recognised optical brands in Europe in terms of innovation, product range and catalogue, with nearly 1,400 stores.
Alain Afflelou is also known for his memorable advertising campaigns, in which he was often the face, to the point of becoming a recognised public figure. Most notably, the first “Tchin-Tchin” campaign launched in 1999 — an offer through which customers could get a second pair of glasses for just 1 franc (now 1 euro) more. An unprecedented offer for its time, which revolutionised the French optical market.
Since then, the company has continued to diversify, offering contact lenses, hearing aids and other products.
Market and digital strategy.
Alain Afflelou operates primarily in the optical market — an essential, stable and vast sector at both French and European level. This market encompasses prescription and sunglasses, as well as contact lenses and hearing-related services.
In France, 7 out of 10 people wear glasses, opening up considerable possibilities in terms of market penetration and potential customer base. The primary targets are adults and seniors looking for effective and stylish corrective eyewear.
The optical market is substantial and relatively stable. In France in 2021, it was worth nearly €6.75 billion. However, the sector remains highly competitive, with more than 40,000 opticians across more than 12,000 optical stores (half of which are independent) as of 2020.
From a trends perspective, the optical market is facing growing demand for products that are tasteful, aesthetic and above all innovative — in terms of frames, correction and lenses. The market is tough, competition is fierce, and it is both urgent and essential to stand out through an impactful and streamlined customer experience, both in-store and online.
Key challenges.
In early July 2022, the Alain Afflelou group contacted us following dissatisfaction with the B2B platform that had been put in place. Here, B2B refers to all of Afflelou’s franchised stores, which represent the largest share of the group’s sales. When we took over the platform, it was dysfunctional at the order processing level. Orders were not being exported correctly from the system, which led to a drop in orders and significant dissatisfaction among franchisees. In this type of commercial model, when B2B doesn’t work, franchised stores and end B2C customers are directly impacted. It was therefore urgent to take back control, stabilise the platform, and deliver the necessary improvements.
The technology stack.
The project takeover spanned 6 months — a period now nicknamed the “firefighting phase”. During this time, we had to contend with a massive accumulation of technical debt, unfinished features, and non-standardised Magento code based on an outdated version. The primary objective was to stabilise the project so that the platform could handle order flows while minimising quality and data losses.
ATI4 inherited a substantial backlog, with essential improvements that had been on hold for over a year: simplified returns, bulk ordering, improved order tracking, and more. Several of these features were integrated in parallel with the upgrade to Magento 2.4.7-p1. To ensure system reliability, we implemented non-regression tests covering the majority of features.
Once the update was complete, we were able to deploy Hyvä and redo the entire site integration. Hyvä was chosen primarily for its modern technical stack: Alpine and Tailwind — modern frameworks mastered by a wide range of developers. The pre-built components provided by the Hyvä teams were also extremely valuable and delivered considerable time savings on the front-end side. This also enabled the project to benefit from a performant CI/CD pipeline via Deployer PHP, accelerating deployments across the different environments.
One of the major challenges during this period was parallelising the front-end and back-end workstreams. Working on both simultaneously required rigorous coordination and constant communication between teams, to ensure that progress on one front didn’t impede progress on the other. This simultaneous approach was crucial for meeting tight deadlines and ensuring that every part of the project evolved in harmony.
Today, the project is better prepared to meet the challenges of internationalisation. In addition, a redesign of the import system is on the roadmap, as it requires improvements to become more performant and meet the company’s growing needs. These next steps are essential to guarantee the platform’s scalability and ongoing efficiency.
Tangible results.
On the cart page, 16.4% of users opt for quick purchase, and of those, 98.2% confirm their order. These improvements led the group to record a 51.27% increase in its conversion rate and an 18% decrease in the exit rate. On the mini cart (sidebar), 9.15% of users choose quick purchase, with an order confirmation rate of 92.8%.
A 21% drop in bounce rate was observed on the homepage, whose load time was significantly optimised. Product pages — particularly complex due to the specific business logic of the optical sector — also benefited from this optimisation, further reinforced by effective caching.
The developer experience improved considerably, time-to-production was reduced, and sales were facilitated. These improvements generate savings while delivering a comfortable and optimised user experience.
A word from Alain Afflelou’s CIO..
They managed in 6 months to eliminate the technical debt. We now deploy very regularly, with production releases that take a maximum of one or two hours and with no issues whatsoever. And during the roadshows that the Executive Committee conducted with franchisees across around ten cities in France, every single time the franchisees expressed satisfaction with the platform, saying it was highly operational. I’m very happy.
– Ludovic TASSY, Alain Afflelou’s CIO.
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