Magento

We were convinced by Magento’s easy and user-friendly backend, by its flexibility concerning design and its built-in SEO features ... All in all, Magento surpassed our expectations.”

Liaison Dangereuse

Tell us about Liaison Dangereuse and Phoenix Medien

Liaison Dangereuse is an online shop for classy lingerie, jewelry and boudoir accessories. We started in May 2007 with a Joomla shop, not understanding anything about web-technologies and search engines, just following a recommendation. Our goal was to offer designer brands outside the mass-market that are still difficult to find in Germany.

Our business grew well, mainly because we received a lot of PR from the fashion and lifestyle press. So we opened up a real boutique in Hamburg in February, 2008. With Google however, we did not get very lucky.

Phoenix Medien is Magento Silver Partner and provides professional services for the new eCommerce platform in Germany and Austria.

What technologies are currently implemented / integrated in the frontend and behind-the-scenes?

Since Magento comes out of the box with numerous great features we only required minor changes to setup all our attributes and products. On top of this Phoenix Medien build a dynamic search assistant called "Ask Loulou" which helps our customers to easily find convenient products in the shop.

Furthermore we integrated a new WorldPay module for credit payment which can freely be downloaded on Magento Connect.

Regarding hosting, we decided to choose Phoenix Medien’s optimized Magento Cluster solution so that the new Magento shop is now actually faster than our shop ever was before.

Why did you choose Magento for the project?

We soon realized that if we want to improve our Google ranking and maintain a stable positioning, we would need a shop technology which is much more search engine friendly. Our choice was between xt:Commerce and Magento. 50% of our advisers were skeptical and recommended a more tried and tested software like XTC.

The main concerns regarding Magento were about the speed of the shop, technical bugs and the adequacy for the European market with its specific legal requirements. The other half just raved about Magento. We were finally convinced by Magento’s easy and user-friendly backend, by its flexibility concerning design and its built-in SEO features. A dream, within only a week, we reached 5 new Google Top 3 positions.

All in all, Magento surpassed our expectations.

What are your future plans with Magento?

We want to further improve our Google ranking, expand to include new brands and categories and offer an English version of the shop to cater to the US customers and rest of Europe. With Magento’s flexibility will surely reach our goals in no time and make ordering easier for customers in- and outside Germany.

Any recommendations for people evaluating Magento?

When we started with Magento in May we made a lot of mistakes in creating products and attributes. After we added several hundred products we got stuck and asked Phoenix Medien for help. They explained us how to setup attribute sets and how to share that information between different product categories which now is the basis for our great search assistant.

If you are considering using Magento and don’t know were to start ask a local Magento Partner – it really saves a lot of time.