Laybyland launched their ecommerce business in 2012, having been ambitious for leading the Australian e-retail market with “Buy now, pay later” models. This models fills exactly the targeted customer needs, bringing the best business performance.

Laybyland has marked themselves spectacular growth throughout nine-year-operating in the Australian market, from about 10,000 products in the two stores to 400,000 products daily supplied on four existing stores.

SECOMM profoundly appreciates the credibility of Laybyland in having provided solutions and implemented all projects for the Laybyland system-wide since 2014.

Given problem

Demand for a robust system

In 2014, after the 2-year-ecommerce-operation, the business realized that converting the current CMS system was a must for a complete and robust retail system in Australia; simultaneously, this old CMS performance had no longer smooth functioning to control much more extensive ecommerce data.

Therefore, migrating to an ecommerce-intensive platform would be a sustainable development strategy to conquer the Aussie market swiftly.

Solution & Technology

Replatforming from Drupal CMS to Magento Enterprise 1.13 

The ecommerce scale had become oversized for a typical Drupal CMS platform. This critical reason required the brand priority to develop a comprehensive system, ensuring the continuity of every operational process.SECOMM kicked off the first steps from basic ecommerce features, building a standard foundation on the later Laybyland web system. Key solutions for the development process include:
▪️Applying Magento Enterprise platform version 1.13
▪️Picking Search Engine Solr with high flexibility and scalability, providing outstanding searching performance
▪️Using AWS infrastructure with high security to support data management via a cloud platform
▪️Using FPC Redis engine to maintain website performance inside 99.99% of the time
▪️Comprehensively building modules to integrate Magento with existing payment gateways and the ERP system.
▪️Integrating more payment systems: Debit Success, Afterpay, ZipMoney, Paypal, etc
▪️Building Laybyland proprietary process – Lay-by payment allows customers to plan their payment frequency when placing orders on laybyland.com.au
▪️Applying responsive design with a simplified interface but still professionalism

After perfecting the system in 2014, all the Laybyland sites had continuously been monitored and maintained 24/7 by SECOMM. In 2017, after successfully mylayby.com acquiring, SECOMM proceeded to implement the Lay-by process for this new site, then mylayby.co.nz website in New Zealand.Also, SECOMM had continuously maintained Magento versions to stay refreshed and modernized with the latest bug-fix update from the Magento community.

Successful migration to Magento 2.3.x since 2020 

The Magento 2.x migration need partly stemmed from the fact that all Magento 1.x versions would be officially discontinued in mid-2020 and no longer received any technical support, feature or security update from the developer community.Additionally, to keep up with cutting-edge technologies as well as increase business value to the Laybyland ecommerce system, SECOMM has undertaken the Magento 2.x migration project for all four sites with the following prominent solutions:

▪️Converting the entire data and function systems from Magento Enterprise 1.14 to Magento Commerce 2.3. Particularly for the database, it was necessary to migrate from 3 sources: Magento default, 3rd parties and vendors.
▪️Completely replacing Solr search engine with Elasticsearch to optimize search-processing speed.
▪️Daily updating a large amount of product data (more than 100000 products per website) from the current Bonar ERP system.
▪️Building more custom features for the Lay-by payment method.
▪️Developing the feature of verifying bank accounts before making Lay-by payments to ensure the user-authenticity.

Layawayland – American version of Laybyland

Layawayland has officially come into operation intending to conquer the US market following the Lay-by payment success in Australia and New Zealand. With the featured Lay-by payment, customers can easily buy products and make planned orders for more than 50,000 genuine products.For the interface, SECOMM designed and refined UI/UX components and branding elements to ensure consistency inside the Laybyland system but still owns suitable characteristics for American customers.For the function, Layawayland would reuse the modules from the Laybyland site to inherit almost all the features with the most reasonable time and cost. However, the current Laybyland.com website worked on Magento Commerce 2.3 (paid version), while Layawayland uses Magento Open Source 2.4.1 (free version). Therefore, the development team must thoroughly understand the whole system to carry out the migration process meticulously, carefully and scientifically, ensuring that the modules are fully converted and efficiently operated.

Outcome

6-year-companionship and a lot more

Throughout 6-year-accompanying, Laybyland has been one of the most prominent customers SECOMM has the opportunity to cooperate with. We continuously strive to provide and develop the best-fit solutions.Also, Laybyland has generously supported us with all the necessary data for successful project finalization. Therefore, the outcomes have completely exceeded all expectations, driving the challenges to the premise of sustainable cooperation between SECOMM and Laybyland.From the Magento 1.x to 2.x version, SECOMM have strictly controlled the operational performance and data update processes. Therefore, the Laybyland system operates optimally evermore, forming the basis for constant growth. Those successes of Laybyland are also the SECOMM success.