iMall: Croatia’s first open online shopping mall
A multi-vendor marketplace where any registered Croatian business could open a free store and start selling. The platform handled card payments and delivery.
- Retail and e-commerce
- Zagreb
- 2010-2015
- stores live at the same time
- ~300
- products
- ~1M
- orders a year
- 20-70k
- click-through rate on “bought together” recommendations
- 3x
The problem
Small and mid-size Croatian retailers wanted to sell online. But building a web shop with card payments, delivery and search visibility cost more than most of them could justify.
There was no local marketplace where a business could simply open a store and start selling.
What we built
A multi-vendor marketplace where any registered business could open a free store in minutes. iMall handled card processing and courier coordination, so merchants only managed their products and orders.
The platform ran on our own PHP/MySQL framework.
- Self-service onboarding: company check, store category (later inferred automatically from the products) and the merchant contract.
- Card payments through the major Croatian card processors, plus PayPal.
- Delivery through integrations with all the major Croatian couriers.
- A “bought together” recommendation engine.
- SEO built into every store.
Results
- The number of stores grew from 100 in 2012 to nearly 300 live at the same time.
- Školska knjiga’s iMall store outranked their own web store on Google within two weeks.
- Merchants included Sancta Domenica, Školska knjiga, Brita, BergHOFF and Liebherr.
- Autohrvatska sold car tyres online through iMall, which was new in Croatia at the time.
- The platform was covered on national radio and TV.
Recommendations learned from purchase data
The recommendation engine learned from purchase data which products customers bought together. Its suggestions got three times the site’s regular click-through rate. This was years before “AI” became a website buzzword.
“Customer feedback so far has been extremely positive, and we believe we’re on the right track.”