Material Escolar, A very didactic ecommerce business!

Who is Material Escolar

Materialescolar.es  is Spain's largest online school supplies store. It sells directly to end customers, addressing the needs of families seeking to acquire supplies for their children, students themselves and educational institutions (schools, academies, training centers and more) that need to stock up on supplies before the beginning of the academic year. 

In addition, more and more companies are choosing materialescolar.es as their online supplier of stationery and paper products.

The catalog currently has 17,550 different products and 9 integrated warehouses, while managing thousands of orders for thousands of customers with different seasonal needs. 

Material Escolar’s value proposition

Founder and CEO Javier Galán, who has a lot of digital experience , had an idea: to open an online store that offers all things stationery, crafts, school supplies, backpacks and more that a person, family or institution may need. What is the difference with other businesses? It’s all in one store and comes in a single shipment. 

Customers can fill a virtual shopping cart with different unit items (a backpack, a pencil, a marker, an eraser, a pen…) that they will receive in a single shipment within 48 hours. 

This is a clear competitive advantage over rival companies such as Amazon, who make partial deliveries subject to the timing and availability of their suppliers. 

This single shipment translates into a convenience for buyers. It also reduces the environmental impact, and lowers logistical costs by regrouping products into a single package.

Additionally, being able to buy exactly the product units that are needed, instead of having to purchase boxes, as with other online stores, advocates for a more sustainable world and a responsible shopping experience.

"Why buy a box of erasers if you only need one or two?" said the founder.

Javier Galán talks us through the rapid growth of “Material Escolar '' in a vertical market and PrestaShop's contribution to the development of the company.

A clear idea and the migration to PrestaShop

With their clear business idea, they initially developed Material Escolar on the Magento Enterprise platform in 2011. 

However, they soon realized that they needed a platform more suited to the complexity of their business, which would provide them with other functionalities, such as the multi-store option, and the integration of warehouses and the same back office for thousands of products and thousands of customers. 

Their biggest challenge was they needed a lot of tools… they chose PrestaShop because: 

• The modules they needed were available in the platform
• They could develop the necessary modules if they weren’t available

For example, the product attributes system, without impacting the core business operations.

We needed a stable and scalable platform with a known and acceptable cost that would allow us to work with thousands of products from various warehouses and stores. PrestaShop fulfilled all of these requirements. Javier Galán 

 

In 2014, they migrated to PrestaShop and managed to scale their ecommerce. 

They set up two online stores: one to sell office supplies, and another for school supplies, stationery, and paper products, integrating the catalog and managing it individually.

They managed to improve their SEO after the migration. It was a top priority since they work with many narrow-margin products and a reduced unit cost. Thus, they need to rely on a powerful natural positioning to compete without investing large amounts in advertising. 

The first benefit we found interesting was the improvement of our Google positioning. Organic traffic increased by 40% to 50% in the first three months. PrestaShop's SEO optimization is fairly good and helps us keep a good position. More specifically, the PrestaShop 1.7 version has helped us a lot regarding our positioning. We currently have about 400,000 visits per month from organic traffic. Javier Galán 

Guaranteed minimum price - STOCK available in 14,642 products and always… AT THE BEST PRICE!

Materialscolar.es project's Data and KPIs

Now let's get to know the project with objective data:

Some Key Figures:

• 17,500 references for stationery, paper products and school supplies
• 2,000 references for backpacks 
• 60% new customers per year
• 400,000 SEO visits per month 
• Conversion rate: 1.5% and it exceeds 3.2% during the Back to School period

PrestaShop modules used by Material Escolar

They use several PrestaShop modules to improve their conversion rate: 

• Reminder Module for Abandoned Shopping Carts 
• Pop-up Exit Module (recovering 8%-10%) 
• Module for Cross-Selling on Shopping Cart (representing 1% -2%) 

The PrestaShop modules that we can find on the Addons Marketplace are one of our keys to success. They enable deploying new features quickly without investing in development. Javier Galán 

Among their plans for the short-term future, they are considering migrating to the latest PrestaShop version (v. 1.8) and boosting their recently-launched third store, which offers customized products. 

Conclusion

Material Escolar is an ecommerce site whose success has been marked by a unique value proposition, a clear positioning strategy and the choice of a platform capable of adapting to the needs of the project.