Paragon Agro: Modernizing Food Retail Through Hyperlocal eCommerce Ecosystem

A Brief Background on Paragon Agro Ltd.

Paragon Agro Ltd., a sister concern of Paragon Group, operates the consumer brand “Paragon Foods”, one of Bangladesh’s leading agro-based food businesses. Paragon Foods provides a range of products to consumers through its vertically integrated business model. These products include antibiotic-free chicken, eggs, dairy products, frozen food products, tea, sweets, and dry grocery items. Paragon Foods upholds significant brand trust from its consumers across the country.

However, before working with us, Paragon Agro Ltd. had only a basic online presence through its own website, which mainly acted as a platform to showcase products and take orders. This basic online presence did not offer any advanced features of eCommerce, nor did it have a customer mobile application and delivery management system. These limitations in online presence restricted Paragon Agro Ltd. from catering to the changing consumer behavior of using mobile devices to make purchases and demanding delivery of products. Therefore, Paragon Agro Ltd. decided to undergo a digital commerce transformation to develop a full-fledged eCommerce solution.

Challenges

Paragon Foods presented us with two urgent business issues:

• Several regional sites due to absence of hyperlocal inventories: Paragon Foods was facing the issue of having several regional sites due to not having a proper inventory management system since their legacy architecture did not support multi-warehouse.
• Connecting to the server configuration that would not support much traffic: They had a setup that could not scale beyond approximately 120 active users and was utilizing a set of very specific server settings that made it slow to respond and would go offline during a busy period.

Furthermore, the old system was complicated in terms of checkout procedures, scope of promotion and reward points, and automatic alerting and image optimization, thus complicating daily operations and dealing with customers.

Our Solution

To create a roadmap regarding the project, a large amount of R&D and technical audits were done with regards to the business requirements of Paragon Foods, already existing websites and operational problems. Upon analysis, nopStation proposed that the solution be developed on nopCommerce platform due to its open-source nature, flexibility and modification to suit the requirements of the hyperlocal commerce. The scalable ASP.Net platform that was extensible and had the capability to handle high traffic levels made it suitable to the needs of Paragon Foods which included high traffic management, complex handling of catalogs (Ready-to-Eat and Ready-to-Cook two business verticals), integration with logistics, payment and analytics systems. A custom-made, development-focused solution was developed to provide a full-fledged, high-performance digital commerce platform with a web storefront, customer storefront mobile app, delivery mobile app, and admin web platform.

Key solutions were:

Hyperlocal Inventory and Warehouse Management: Paragon is now able to handle inventory at the warehouse level, with visibility for Ready-to-Eat and Ready-to-Cook items. Variations for multiple warehouses and delivery times are now dynamically managed, allowing for fulfillment within any region.

Scalable Infrastructure: The previous static server environment was not capable of dealing with heavy traffic. The nopStation has launched a containerized auto-scaling environment, which also worked well in the case of heavy traffic.

Image 1.2 One-page Checkout

Optimized One-Page Checkout Experience: Checkout was redesigned to provide a single-page checkout experience, making purchases much faster reducing checkout multisteps.

Image 1.3 Mega Menu to Category Product Listing

Product and Category Management: Paragon now has the ability to digitally set up categories, product variations, stock quantities and badges (Best Seller, Pre-order, Discount, New Product) across multiple warehouses and maintain the accurate display of products and their inventory.

Improved Customer Retention: nopStation introduced built-in customer profiles in Paragon that included addresses, order history, wishlist, and reward points, and this led to customized experience and reward programs.

Promotion, Discount, and Payment Solutions: Dynamic discount rules, promotions per warehouse, tokenized payment methods, and reward point integration enable Paragon to now have flexible campaigns and enhance conversion rates.

Image 1.4 Storefront & Delivery App

Delivery Personnel App: A dedicated app will now assist in assigning shipments, tracking deliveries in real-time, and sending notifications with automated actions, as well as minimizing operational overhead and increasing efficiency in the last-mile.

Marketing and Analytics Improvements: Paragon also includes full integration with GA4 and Facebook Pixel/CAPI along with web and mobile push campaigns, which offer actionable information about sales, inventory, and promotions.

Performance Optimization: Images are now served via a containerized service to improve page load speed, and scheduled tasks are reliably triggered and monitored through AWS Lambda and EventBridge.

The solution was achieved by turning Paragon’s fragmented digital activities into a centralized, efficient, and scalable multilingual environment to facilitate eCommerce management, customer experience, and decision-making for future growth.

Results

Image 1.5 Results converting into Impacts

• The number of active users 4X rose after 1 week of launch, which ensured the smooth operation in the peak time.
• Easy checkout and order taking with one-page flow that enhances conversion rates.
• Better operational efficiency and inventory visibility with tracking of shipments in the warehouse.
• Effective digital marketing with GA4, Facebook Pixel/CAPI, and push notifications.
• Ensures consistent and coherent user experience on both web, mobile as well as delivery apps.

About nopStation

nopStation is the leading Gold Solution Partner of nopCommerce and an eCommerce wing of Brain Station 23 Ltd., a top-ranking software development company, headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At nopStation, we design, build and enhance eCommerce solutions on top of the nopCommerce platform for clients of all business sizes. The company has technology partnerships with 12+ leading ISVs including, Microsoft, Google, and AWS. We help our customers build their business online by developing the right eCommerce solution using nopCommerce at a competitive price and reasonable timeline.