Alcone Company
BOSS Logics solutions
CMS, eCommerce
business solution
If you have a brand with a heritage as rich as Alcone Company—which started in 1952 as a pharmacy that also sold cosmetics and false eyelashes to Broadway showgirls and starlets—you need a technology infrastructure that can keep up with demand from a devoted customer base in search of the best makeup from around the world.
Why boss logics
When Alcone first approached BOSS Logics, it was because they felt limited technically by their previous eCommerce platform, particularly when it came to creating and assigning product attributes and categories as part of their merchandising efforts for their thousands of SKUs.
“The hardest thing about cosmetics is that this is a highly customized field,” said J.D. Kraemer, Alcone Company’s Web Director. “We’re not a clothing vendor, so things aren’t small, medium and large. There were things we wanted to be able to do but we couldn’t make happen.”
Other platform-related factors, such as increasing downtime and minimal order capability, made it apparent that the company needed to look elsewhere for the answer to its eCommerce functionality challenges.
“We knew we wanted to change vendors, but we also wanted to keep the basic site design,” Kraemer said. “We were just looking for a functionality change. We had a very pretty website but it wasn’t that smart.”
Over the course of just three months, Kraemer worked with the BOSS Logics team to replatform the website, import Alcone’s entire catalog, configure the eCommerce functionality and its multiple required integrations (including with Alcone’s ERP, payment processing site, and shipping options) and even eventually make some design changes.
“The transition was very simple,” Kraemer noted. “The things that I assumed would take the longest were the visual aspects because it’s such a visually intensive market, but the redesign was seamless and [BOSS Logics] suggested a ton of very simple redesign fixes that streamlined the page and made navigating very intuitive.”
After going live on the BOSS Logics platform, Alcone immediately saw a number of benefits, including increases in site speed, revamped SEO, more streamlined shipping options for customers, and more flexibility and functionality around promotions, such as auto item add-ins and advanced logic for if/then promotions. And with regard to their thousands of SKUs, Alcone is now able to create items and item families the way their business actually works. According to Kraemer: “We can create item families in a smarter way than before. We’re able to model it as it exists in the real world.”
That focus on real-world results also extends to BOSS Logics’ reporting and analytics capabilities. “Immediately, straight out of the gate, there’s a beautiful dashboard that’s intuitive to look at that speaks to our products and categories,” Kraemer said. “BOSS Logics allows us to create more meaningful, interesting reports now.”
When asked about ROI and value from their BOSS Logics solution, Kraemer didn’t hesitate. “Just from a cost standpoint, the value is way superior to what we were getting previously,” he explained. “The product control that we have now is definitely helping us save time with customers...our phones have actually stopped ringing for the most part, which is weirdly terrifying but oddly comforting because most people are shopping online.”