Elisa webshop is a commercially significant channel for us. We have developed it to improve its findability, payment and delivery methods. We are proud of our work, which is reflected in increased sales and customer satisfaction.
Jussi-Pekka Erkkola, Director, eCommerce & Digital Services, Elisa
Quality customer experience is reflected in the results
In the Elisa webshop, products are now more easily found in the channels used by the customer. Once a purchase decision has been made, the customer is offered a wide range of delivery and payment options. Elisa can offer same-day deliveries to customers living in the Helsinki region – a promise that was impossible only a couple of years ago. New best practices from around the world will be adopted, and better delivery and payment options will be available to more people in the future.
In operation since 2012, the history of Elisa's webshop is an eventful one. The webshop has had to adapt to changing consumer behaviour, such as the Black Friday sales spikes that are now a normal part of online shopping behaviour, or new devices used for online browsing. To stay ahead of these changes, the development team took a systematic approach to developing the webshop. A sign of success lies in our ability to modernise the technologies that run the webshop without disruption to the service. These new technology solutions make sure Elisa's service remains reliable and efficient for years to come.
Elisa's webshop is built with modern technologies
Transitioning to modern technologies
Elisa webshop has two main functionalities: to provide an efficient search and review of the products, and an easy and safe ordering process. To ensure these, the service is backed by the best tools designed to support optimisation and reliability.
Over the years, the Elisa webshop has been revamped in many ways, both in look and function. The user interface has been redesigned, harmonised, and made more accessible with a modern React library. Servers have been changed from traditional virtual machines to on-premise cloud services using Docker and Openshift. These innovations improved the customer experience, increased efficiency of development work, and enabled e-commerce to scale rapidly in response to peak online traffic volumes.
Search engine optimisation is crucial in a competitive market
Findability is a key part of e-commerce success; after all, an easier customer path is a sure way to boost sales. As digital services develop and increase, so too does the competition. Making your services easy to find online can put you one step firmly ahead.
In Elisa's webshop, findability is constantly being developed by clarifying the content of the store for both people and the search engine indexing services. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is being done continuously. Significant improvements were made in 2018–2019 to enhance SEO findability, include product reviews and improve the site search. Industry-leading tools were put in place to explore and validate potential barriers to sales. As a result, we’ve continued to see an upward shift in customer experience across the user journey year after year.
Black Friday peaks are managed with a cache solution
Today's online behaviour commonly sees peaks in demand around crucial shopping days, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Elisa's annual Black Friday campaign produces multiple load peaks compared to regular consumption. Proper handling of these spikes can have a significant impact on total annual sales. Elisa has invested in this by creating efficient multi-layered caching solutions to ensure the webshop always runs smoothly and reliably. Over the years, we've found Varnish to be the most reliable tool.
Product reviews make purchase decisions easier
Product reviews are an essential part of modern e-commerce. They increase the visibility of search results and improve the overall user experience. With the Lipscore integration, we were able to collect authentic user reviews and bring reviews directly to product pages - making it easier for customers to make purchase decisions.
Site search improves product findability
Site search is one of the cornerstones of modern webshops. We integrated the Klevu search service into Elisa's webshop. Klevu’s features enabled user-friendly search results and useful previews of the results. In addition, the features helped improve the search findability of the most popular devices and services.
A service that provides a seamless and unified digital experience
Providing a smooth customer experience with the omnichannel principle
From the customer's point-of-view, Elisa's webshop offers a seamless service and unified digital experience. Technically, however, it's similar to an integration layer, where many smaller services are combined into one system. Thanks to an organisation-level service design and careful user interface design, Elisa's webshop feels harmonious to use, despite the complexity.
Elisa has always paid attention to the careful design of their service. The webshop, as well as other Elisa services, utilise a component library that enables unity through different services. Uniform practices have also enabled the rapid implementation of new features by different teams.
The service is being developed under the guidance of customer feedback, analytics and Elisa's strategy. Its features are A/B tested to continuously optimise sales. In the future, special attention will be paid to developing the service for better accessibility.
Supporting the customer from inspiration to order
Once a purchase decision has been made, the customer is only halfway on the purchase journey. To support the completion of the journey, it’s important to ensure the customer can complete checkout with ease. Elisa’s webshop supports this process by identifying the user and any customer information that may already exist, and by offering several constantly evolving payment and delivery options to seal the deal.
When it comes to deliveries, the webshop offers a comprehensive range of options, from the traditional postal service to various courier services and pick-up facilities.
Special attention has also been paid to order automation, allowing customers to update their internet service subscriptions online without the need for customer service to be involved.
By enriching the user interface components, the webshop’s online features also help to serve the organisation’s traditional sales channels, such as in-store sales. This provides the organisation and its customers with an even larger range of services, but requires additional security requirements to be met, in addition to enhanced fault tolerance on time limits and testing. Now Elisa entertainment's products are a part of the webshop.
The team and atmosphere make working fun. It’s rewarding to be given a lot of responsibility across the board, such as the web architecture. On the other hand, Elisa is an agile organisation with different actors carrying out their responsibilities brilliantly, and cooperation is important in creating an integrated system such as the webshop.
Esko Kokkonen, Senior Software Architect, Nitor
Transparency and taking responsibility as the basis for agile cooperation
Over the years, Elisa's webshop product ranges have expanded significantly, consumer behaviour has undergone a significant change and the technologies have evolved. Therefore, when building a webshop, it is necessary to expect everything to adapt over time.
Elisa is an agile organisation. The webshop application development team works in collaboration with other teams in developing e-commerce functionalities. In the multi-supplier model, transparency and shared responsibility are important. The ways of working are developed iteratively and the introduction of new features has been made clearer between different teams.
The shared vision of the team and the organisation also enhances development. When developing for e-commerce, development ideas come partly from the themes of Elisa's strategy and are partly defined by business needs and the regulations that guide them. Thanks to this process, the accessibility of digital services and the sale of 5G services are now strongly driving development.
We want to improve our operations continuously. A safe, equal and respectful working atmosphere is the cornerstone of our development team. It encourages us to try new things. By experimenting, we also learn more and can share best practices with other development teams.
Antti Metso, Online Development Team Leader, Consumer Business, Elisa
Elisa and Nitor are building a better digital society together
Elisa and Nitor have been collaborating since 2008. This long-term collaboration is based on shared values and the view that elevating customer service should be the foundation of everything we do. As customers move to digital service channels, software development has genuine societal significance.
Since the early years, cooperation has intensified and grown into a strategic partnership to address the critical challenges of digitalisation. Nitor’s digital engineers work with Elisa employees on demanding projects in technology, design, agility and analytics. In addition, Nitor's strategic expertise has been utilised in the development of corporate architecture.
For Sakari Volanen, Head of Ecosystems & Vendors at Elisa, Nitor is an important partner. “Nitor has been the best partner to help us with the most difficult challenges of digitalisation. Together, we want to build a better society in the form of better digital services,” says Sakari.
A long history means that cooperation can be trusted. "Nitor has always been our partner in solving new and difficult issues," Sakari concludes.
