With the rise of the new Decathlon Marketplace, a great opportunity arises for online store owners who want to expand their access to new customers. However, integrating and synchronizing data from the stores to this 3rd party marketplace is not always an easy procedure. In this article, you can read how we managed to solve this problem for our client - a WooCommerce store in Romania.
About the Client
Our client is a company that owns more than 5 online stores, selling massage, sports, beach, medical, and veterinary products. Among this vast array of products, our client directly imports DrKelen products - specialized sports gels and creams - into Romania. As a result of their activity, the client was contacted by Decathlon Marketplace Romania to promote their products on their platform.
The Challenge
Having several online stores in the digital field, our client has a dedicated team with the necessary knowledge to integrate the platforms used for the proper functioning of the stores. However, once they started collaborating with Decathlon, challenges arose. Here are the problems that needed to be solved:
- Importing XLS files with products into Decathlon Marketplace.
- Synchronizing product data (stock, price, photos, etc.) from the online store (WooCommerce) www.drkelen.ro with the Decathlon marketplace through API.
- Lack of experts or sufficient documentation for integrating the Decathlon marketplace.
Initially, the client's team tried to implement these integrations, but without success. They had to seek support from other companies experienced in integrating marketplaces, but these also failed. It should be noted that Decathlon only offers support based on API documentation and other errors, not having a dedicated team to ensure synchronization and integration of partnership solutions.
The client was recommended to seek Makeitfuture’s support to solve the challenges described above.
The Solution
Initially, our team requested API documentation from Decathlon, along with other relevant information necessary to resolve the challenges.
After analyzing the documentation provided by Decathlon, our experts conducted several tests and managed to import an Excel file with all the products manually. This process was then double-checked by both the client and a second specialized team, to ensure everything was working smoothly.
After that, our team created a Decathlon module/application in Make.com, successfully importing the Excel file through API.
Finally, another Decathlon module was created in the Make.com platform, which updates each product in the Decathlon marketplace or creates a new one if it does not exist.
Our next challenge is to synchronize orders from Decathlon to the client's online store.
Client Feedback
What challenges did our team solve for your business?
Makeitfuture helped us develop and successfully implement the Decathlon Marketplace API.
How would you describe your collaboration with the makeitfuture team?
A serious company, with wonderful people, open, who managed to develop in a short time what was necessary for implementation in Decathlon.
How accountable did you find the team members when working on your project?
Very dedicated and accountable!!
How would you rate our technical skills?
If I could give a grade, it would be 10+
Would you recommend our services to others and if so, why?
Yes, I recommend you with great pleasure.
Why? Seriousness, dedication, and eagerness to discover and solve any situation.
Developer Feedback
It was a pleasure to work on this project because I like challenges. I am a person who likes to solve problems that other people have not managed or have only partially succeeded in. I like to find solutions and I believe that there is no human-made thing that cannot be solved.
Encountered Problems
The Decathlon marketplace platform is a global one, with a standard structure and construction, which unfortunately is not easily adaptable to different products and legislations.
Specific identified problems:
- It is mandatory to enter the product description in English, which is not specified in the documentation.
- Lack of documentation for the Romanian market, as the Decathlon marketplace is a recently launched platform.
- We had to learn from scratch how a marketplace recently introduced in Romania and Europe works.
Results
Our client is now an official Decathlon Marketplace partner and benefits from access to a larger market, with access to a wider range of customers.
Our client's products are automatically synchronized with the Decathlon Marketplace. When a product is added to the WooCommerce store www.drkelen.ro, it is automatically added to the third-party marketplace. Also, when the stock in the client's store changes, it instantly changes on the marketplace. This automation works the same for price changes, images, descriptions, etc.
Thus, our client saves time by automatically managing published offers and keeps customers satisfied with the accuracy of the provided data.
In Conclusion
These automations and integrations created and implemented greatly ease the client's work, eliminating the need for manual import of product data; contributed to the satisfaction of end users because they are not in the situation of ordering a product that is not in stock; provided our client the opportunity to increase sales volume due to exposure on multiple platforms.
Makeitfuture is an official Decathlon integrator and offers a wide offer of complex API integrations.
If you are looking for a way to take your business to the next level, contact our expert team for a free discovery call.
