Creating a user-friendly parts marketplace for coffee grinders

Mahlkönig coffee grinders are praised by baristas around the world for their premium engineering, which produces a superior tasting coffee while also optimizing behind-the-bar tasks.

The challenge

Though Mahlkönig’s US-based eCommerce store doesn’t sell its signature grinders, it does sell an exhaustive selection of different parts and components for all of Mahlkönig’s main offerings—over 800 SKUs in total. 

The real challenge wasn’t the sheer amount of products, but rather designing a fast, user-friendly way for customers to navigate the catalog, without getting lost in a sea of part numbers and similar-looking components. Codal’s goal was to deliver an engaging customer experience that allows for seamless product navigation and acts as a knowledge center for product support and maintenance.

Our team kicked things off with a Discovery phase, where we dove deep into Mahlkönig’s existing eCommerce storefront, looking at how customers move from one point to the next. After interviewing stakeholders, performing tests, and analyzing historical data, Codal had enough insider knowledge and technical expertise to start building out a new user experience—one that would promote higher engagement, conversions, and sales among Mahlkönig’s American customer base. 

The solution

Codal’s UX design team began by sketching sitemaps, determining the optimal way to balance a large, highly technical product catalog alongside an in-depth knowledge center that included how-to manuals, technical specs, and FAQs. Eventually, we settled on prioritising product navigation by including several different user flows for finding the correct part.

In addition to a ‘Filter by Model’ function on the product listing page (PLP), our designers created a separate ‘Shop Parts By Model’ module, which acts as a wizard for customers looking for a specific part to their coffee grinder.
After architecting the site, we conducted a theme analysis, examining Shopify’s library of templates and determining the best fit for Mahlkönig. The Shopify Plus theme needed to meet both the functional and aesthetic requirements of the site, while adhering to the structure Codal planned earlier in the design phase. After selecting a Shopify Plus theme, our developers got to work customizing it to Mahlkönig’s exact specifications.

On top of standard customisation work—aligning the theme with Mahlkönig’s brand conventions, for instance—our engineers built some of the store’s features entirely from scratch, including the aforementioned ‘Shop Parts By Model’ feature.

Additional custom development was required for the knowledge center as well: The third-party plugin chosen for the knowledge center module didn’t support images and PDFs, both of which Mahlkönig needed. And to append Shopify’s product-tagging feature, Codal created custom tags for each component, so that users could easily see which parts were compatible with which grinders.

The result

In the end, our team built product pages for over 800 SKUs, boosted the site’s conversion rate to 4.21%, and increased average order value (AOV) to $219.42.

Codal delivered an online store that embodies both the Mahlkönig brand and offers an easy-to-use, effortlessly navigable customer experience. We look forward to future work with Mahlkönig’s US-based eCommerce site.