Natural Santé: B2B portals as good as new!

Natural Santé, a leading French group in the development and distribution of natural food supplements

A French company specializing in natural health and dietary supplements, the Natural Santé group operates in two sectors:

PHARMA(Laboratoire Santé Verte) for professionals
BIO (Natural Distribution) comprising 5 brands:
- Desert Essence
- Plantes Laboratoires
- Diet Horizon
- Attitude
- Vital Syrup

All these companies offer a range of products designed to promote health and well-being, using ingredients of natural origin. Their mission? To democratize access to natural health alternatives through an educational approach, offering effective health solutions for the whole family and all their daily needs.

Creation date

2014

Sector of activity

Wellness services - parapharmacy

Technologies used

WordPress

Magento 2

Sage 100

Project skills

Design
UI/UX
Responsive design
Front-end development
Development back
Project management

B2B portals need a makeover!

A number of needs prompted the Natural Santé group to call on our expertise to overhaul the B2B portals of their entities. These portals, developed on WordPress, had a number of shortcomings:

a multiplicity of plugins: incompatible updates, cumbersome sites;
non-optimized user paths;
optimizable functionalities.

For the redesign of the existing portals, the objectives were as follows:

Interface redesign and a personalized experience for each type of user

Natural Santé had an initial idea of the web design expected for the two portals: tabs, functionalities, design, the scope was already well defined.

These elements were re-challenged under the expert eye of our UX designer to propose a "UX friendly" webdesign.

The page structure has been ordered to prioritize information and make it easier for users to find what they're looking for. The mobile design has also been optimized to maintain the tabular display of orders and invoices without impacting the customer experience.

Each portal has been designed in accordance with Santé verte's and Natural Distribution's own graphic charters and brand universes.

Methodology

It took 3 months to implement the project: from the project kick-off meeting on July 25, 2023 to the launch of the new portals on September 25, 2023. 5 milestones were organized throughout the project:

Project launch: presentation of the teams, the project, its challenges and objectives + definition of the functional and technical scope.

Construction of wireframes: a collaborative workshop in which our UI/UX expert challenged and refined the structure of the spaces.

Presentation and validation of mock-ups: discussion of mock-ups, explanation of graphic choices and confirmation of web design to launch the production phase.

Intermediate milestones: simple progress points to give Natural Santé teams visibility and secure the integration process.

Acceptance: report on internal acceptance by portal users' business teams, based on an acceptance booklet.

Once again, we worked in an agile way to gain flexibility and guarantee the quality and conformity of the delivered functionalities. Between these milestones, numerous exchanges took place between the functional and technical teams to deliver quality results quickly and adaptively. Since going live, we continue to exchange with Natural Santé with a view to fine-tuning the portals to add functionalities and an API interface with Zendesk, the CRM used. A ticketing system has also been set up via Monday for maximum responsiveness to new requests.

Interface redesign and a personalized experience for each type of user

Far from a simple Wordpress showcase site, this project required data retrieval from each of the portals to enable customers to retrieve their data in near-real time.

Although each portal has its own interface and distinct functionalities, the overall architecture remains more or less identical, with :

A first part forexporting orders in progress, invoices, credit notes (SQL & PDF files) and new customers (csv file) from SAGE to the portal.
A second part forimporting elements loaded into the database.

In addition to the purely technical aspects, the new portals had to offer the following functionalities:

Filter and sort orders and invoices;
Export all or a selection of orders;
View your invoices in one click;
Search for orders, invoices and credit notes by keyword

The project +

The final word?

Working with Smotly was an excellent experience.

I've enjoyed working with them on this project, and watching our two new customer portals develop over the years.

Floriane, the project manager, provided excellent follow-up at every stage, alerting us to any potential bottlenecks.
Estelle, the graphic designer, modeled modern, intuitive customer portals for our customers.
Théodore, the developer, was able to reproduce these designs pixel by pixel and meet the various technical challenges imposed.

Thanks to Smotly for this collaboration!

AURELIEN GIRAUD
Project Manager at Natural Santé

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