Chic style for younger generations

Long-term Magento support for Chicwish

About Chicwish

Chicwish is the US brand that follows the original idea – cater to younger generations with a sense of chic style. They operate not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom and Asia, and have over 8 years of experience in the industry. The company has a huge collection of vintage-inspired and handmade clothes and accessories. Chicwish is a home of great quality goods and affordable prices.

About the project

Challenge

Back in 2017, ChicWish sought a development team to help bring its marketing strategy to life. They succeeded in the Asian market and started to conquer the USA, Europe, and Australia, but their website wasn’t ready for it.

It was quite a comfortable but outdated store on Magento 1. It was slow and had UX issues, which were a dealbreaker for getting new customers in new markets. They understood that new customers would hardly choose them over their competitors if the website loaded slowly and didn’t support the region’s payment and shipping options standard. They also needed to integrate marketing channels to distribute their goods more.

Client

Chicwish

Country

Hong Kong

Industry

Fashion and Apparel

Platform

Magento 2

Services & notable features

Website migration to Magento 2
Custom feature development
Customized returns for different locations
Small tweaks for better conversion
Performance optimization
Bug fixing and security

Integrations

Integration with microservices
Instagram feed

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Solution

To achieve this goal, they decided to hire a trustworthy technical team. That’s when they found BelVG. The plan was to go through with the migration and keep the team for website maintenance and ongoing development. It worked with our company.

The BelVG team went through with the following tasks:

Website migration to Magento 2
Website integration with different payment and shipping methods as well as ERP system and Instagram feed.
Implementation of custom features including Shop the look, Find your size.
Setup of custom return flow for different regions.

They also required design help to ensure the website was comfortable and appealing for new users.

We have been working with Chicwish as their development partners since 2017. The website has about 1.3M users monthly and 11 storeviews, and the company’s revenue reached 60M in 2023.

Tell us about your project

Get in touch with our team. Send us an email at [email protected] or call us 1 650 353 2301

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Magento 2 migration

Chicwish wanted us to re-platform their online store without losing any items and functions, and we did it smoothly. We started work with item migration, such as products, orders, customer accounts, CMS pages & static blocks, product attributes, and more. Then, we were to port the functionality from Magento 1 to the new Magento 2.

We managed the migration of such solutions as:

Extended order export,
Additional protection on login and registration,
PayPal payment,
Frontend return management,
Frontend advanced search.

Features and tweaks

The features of the Chicwish website are intended to keep users on the website and gently guide them to the purchase. We’ve implemented several significant features and some tweaks to improve usability.

Find your size

The Chicwish brand originates from Hong Kong, China, where the clothing sizing differs from that of Europe and the USA. As a result, the client needed to help their users choose the right size and reduce returns and exchanges.

We integrated the website with a service that allows you to distinguish the size of the clothes according to your parameters, body type, and how you want them to fit (fit, regular, or loose). Once the quiz is completed, the parameters are saved and can be used for any other product in the store. Customers do not need to retake the test for each item.

Empower your website both on frontend and backend. Our certified developers always work according to the plan. Developing a theme for your website, you get the desired solution for your business and a reliable partner – BelVG.

Shop the look

The Chicwish web store has a unique Shop the Look feature. When clicking on an item, the user can scroll down to several pictures with related products that complete the look. The looks are divided into several styles and colors.

When clicking on one of the pictures, a modal window opens, where the user can see all the items from the picture available in the store and their prices. They can put the items in the cart or add them directly from the modal window to their wishlist. They can also go to separate pages of these items.

The feature helps the users find the matching outfit and increase the average check.

Small tweaks

Our designers also audited the website and suggested more changes to increase the time people spend on the website and reduce the bounce rate.

Video on the product page. We implemented a custom slider for the product page and added the possibility of adding Vimeo and YouTube videos. We also optimized the website so that the client could add several videos without impacting the page load speed.
Pinned reviews. The shop’s admin can pin several reviews to always be at the top, serving as another promotion tool.
Shopping cart popup. This popup appears when an item is placed in the cart. It has related products and suggestions for going to checkout or continuing shopping.
Guest order linking with a new account. If a customer makes a guest order with an email address and then creates an account with the same one, the order is automatically linked to this email address and appears in their account.

These and other design tweaks helped to reach a 4.5-minute average session duration and to decrease the bounce rate from 58% to 45%.

Custom Returns

The comfortable return policy is significant for Chicwish as the business operates online, and the users must be able to return products if they don’t like them.

After receiving the clothes, the logged-in users can choose three options in their account:

Return the item and get a full refund
Leave the item and get bonus points
Leave items and get a partial refund, which is available only one time

We added this functionality to the default one. Magento counts this data automatically and gathers extended statistics. The store admin can then download it in XML format.

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The return labels

The team customized processes for different countries based on their couriers. When choosing to return the item, the system analyzes the address where the item was delivered and picks up a courier depending on the country. It generates a label the user needs to print out and attach to the package. Supported labels include DLH, USPS, EzeeShip, and Frayund. It allows for a streamlined return process and ensures the package is delivered to the correct destination.

Integration with Style.me SDK

ChicWish is committed to improving customers’ shopping experience by reducing returns. To achieve this, they have integrated their website with Style.me, a service that enables users to create a virtual avatar with their body measurements and type.

This feature allows customers to try on clothes on the avatar and see how the product will look on their body shape in 3D, making it easier to make informed purchase decisions. However, it is currently only available for a limited selection of items.

Third-Party Integrations

The Chicwish website is integrated with several systems, including ERP, payment and shipping systems. Here are several that we set up:

Search API. We didn’t use the Magento default search. We integrated the website with a third-party microservice via the API. The team customized a frontend for queries and result output.
Instagram Feed. The main page is integrated with a ChicWish Instagram to understand the brand’s identity better.
Product Reviews. The review is also made via integration with a third-party service. We customized it by adding the opportunity to add photos to the review.
Sitejabber Reviews in the cart. We also integrated the website with the Sitejabber website, which shows the recent reviews on the Chicwish store.
Payment methods. Chicwish provides many payment possibilities, such as GooglePay, Klarna, AfterPay, and ApplePay.

The integrations improve the trustworthiness of the website, as well as the user experience.

Bug fixing and bot attacks

The BelVG team encountered a lot of bugs and security attacks during our work with Chicwish. Here are the most recent ones.

Wrong quote saving

The website was running slow due to incorrect quote-saving settings. In Magento, the quote entity is the shopping cart that users create. Initially, the client set the quote deleting time to 3 years while setting the import parameters.

When the team investigated the loading speed problem, they found billions of quotes significantly slowing down the website. They needed to filter and clean all these three-year-old quotes to resolve the issue. They also reduced the quote deleting time to a smaller period to prevent the list from growing that much. As a result, the website is now working much faster.

Optimization of the wishlist

The website has up to 1,5 million users monthly. Many of the buyers were purchasing about 100-150 items, and they did so via the website’s wishlist feature. It worked well to the point when the website started to lag a lot, and the team had to investigate the issue.

It turned out the bot attack caused these problems. The malicious bots generated wishlists with thousands of items, whereas legitimate users typically added no more than 150 items. Then, the items were put in the cart by activating the Add All to Cart button, making thousands of requests simultaneously. As a result, the website started to experience lags and crashes.

After researching the problem, the team decided to limit the number of items the user could add to the cart from the wishlist to 150 items, which helped to resolve the issue.

Project Results

The main results that Chicwish achieved during our partnership.

Decreased number of returns

The team integrated several features targeted at reducing the number of returns. As a result, they dropped by almost 30%.

Longer session duration

The implemented features and minor tweaks are made to engage users in the website activity and gently push them toward the purchase, which works as the average session time increased by 3 minutes in 1.5 years.

Annual revenue growth

In the seven years we have worked with Chicwish, they've become a well-known international business with 60 million yearly revenue and millions of loyal buyers.