Global E-Commerce Marketplace Platform Leader Mirakl Relies on MadCap Flare to Create a Modern Documentation Web Portal that Helps Customers and Mirakl Employees Find Answers Faster

More than 200 customers in 40 countries, including some of the best-known brands around the world rely on Mirakl to power their online B2B and B2C e-commerce marketplaces. To simplify these customers’ use of its solution, Mirakl has replaced its wiki-based documentation with a modern documentation web portal based on MadCap Flare . Now both the company’s customers and employees can find information and get answers to their questions faster using the interactive documentation portal.

When businesses want to create an online marketplace, they increasingly turn to Mirakl, a world leader in delivering the technology, expertise, and partner ecosystem needed to launch an e-commerce marketplace. With the Mirakl Marketplace Platform, both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprises can increase the number of products available for buyers, grow the lifetime value of customers, and anticipate buyer needs and preferences.

Committed to ease of use, the Mirakl Marketplace Platform is a turn-key software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that is easy to integrate into any e-commerce platform. Mirakl further simplifies use of its solution by providing different sets of documentation for marketplace operators, sellers and partners via a modern documentation web portal created using the single-source capabilities of MadCap Flare.

Aligning with the Corporate Experience

As a rapidly growing, high-tech start-up, Mirakl originally relied on wiki technology widely adopted by its engineers to create and publish both its internal and external documentation. The company would simply give customers open access to wiki topics, protected by the requirement to sign-on with their credentials, in order to read the topics.

However, the wiki had limitations. Internal and external users, alike, found it difficult to navigate and find the documentation they needed, and customers could view information Mirakl preferred not to share, such as the history of a topic or history of modifications. Moreover, it was difficult and time-consuming for Mirakl’s technical writers to produce multiple versions of content for different users. The company realized it was time to look for a new way to produce its documentation.

“We wanted to single-source parts of our documentation and use conditions to meet different user profile needs, so that we could write the content once and reuse it in several places. That was really important for us,” recalled Nicolas Philippe, a technical communicator at Mirakl. “We also wanted a look and feel that would align more closely with our corporate website and application.”

“Because our wiki solution could not provide the capabilities we wanted, we tested 25 tools over the course of four months to identify one that could,” Nicolas noted. “Through our evaluation we determined that Flare would be the right tool for us and for the whole company. Flare had the main features we needed, and it provided quality at a good price.”

Achieving Efficiency with MadCap Flare

Today, Mirakl uses MadCap Flare to deliver a modern, HTML5-based documentation web portal where users get access to different content based on their roles. External user profiles include clients who are either marketplace operators or sellers, along with their partners. To tailor content for each profile, Mirakl technical writers use conditions in MadCap Flare.

“In Flare, there is now only one source of documentation, and we put conditions on it for each of the user profiles. So, when we publish, these different users get the right respective content,” Nicolas notes.

Taking advantage of conditions and ability to publish to multiple outputs with MadCap Flare, Mirakl also produces PDF documents as needed—for example when the company’s legal department needs a PDF of Mirakl’s support team description for customers. In addition to conditional text, the technical writing team also relies on snippets and tables of contents.

“We have a documentation that covers any aspect of our product, and we reuse a lot of content, so using snippets with Flare makes it easier to manage,” Nicolas explains. “We also have several tables of contents in Flare according to different products and users, which help us to produce documentation faster.”

Mirakl has set up MadCap Flare such that variable files are generated directly from the code in the Mirakl application. For example, when there is a title in the Mirakl application, it’s regularly exported into MadCap Flare as a variable. To ensure that these variables work properly, the technical writing team relies on MadCap Flare’s Analyzer functionality.

“A variable can be removed or changed in the application code, and if the ID changes, it can be broken in Flare,” Nicolas notes. “We use Flare’s Analyzer feature to check for broken variables and make sure everything is okay. It’s a huge time-saver.”

Fostering Agile Collaboration

Mirakl’s technical writers create all technical content by sharing information with the company’s developers and technical experts. To facilitate this effort, the team takes advantage of MadCap Flare’s integration with GitHub to store the project and published output. The integration also enables Mirakl to publish updates within minutes of them being added to MadCap Flare.

“Our Flare-based documentation server gets the published output from GitHub and displays it to customers every five minutes. If we make a change or publish, five minutes later it will be available to customers,” Nicolas observes. “We take an agile approach with our e-commerce marketplace solution where we release a new version every two to three days. Flare and the integration with GitHub enable us to be really flexible and deliver our documentation at the same time, and sometimes prior to some features.”

Mirakl’s technical writers also collaborate with the company’s client success and marketing team members who develop videos on the more business-focused aspects of running an e-commerce marketplace.

“Our client success team creates informational videos, which they host on Vimeo,” Nicolas explains. “We can simply use the Vimeo link to embed the video in Flare, so users can view it without even leaving the documentation page.”

Enhancing the Customer Experience

Embedded videos are just one way that Mirakl creates an intuitive experience for customers. Its technical writers have used MadCap Flare deliver a documentation web portal that features a modern responsive design, which adjusts to users’ different screens. Additionally, they rely on MadCap Capture, the software for screen capture and image editing that is integrated with MadCap Flare, to incorporate graphics.

“Our Flare-based documentation displays very well in responsive design to support our mobile and tablet users. Pictures are easy to view, and the text is easy to read,” Nicolas notes. “We also provide a link from our e-commerce marketplace solution, so users can click on a link and be seamlessly redirected to our documentation portal without having to enter credentials again.”

Other ways Mirakl simplifies its users’ experiences is through the use of pop-up text to put small tips about specific terms and drop-down text for long tables in its “Frequently Asked Questions,” so that users can more easily navigate this section.

“With Flare, our documentation is now more intuitive and attractive for users,” says Nicolas.

Since delivering Mirakl’s MadCap Flare-based documentation portal, the support team has reported receiving fewer support tickets about the main features in the Mirakl e-commerce marketplace solution because they are covered in the documentation portal. Additionally, both the support and sales teams find that they can answer many questions simply by sending customers links to the relevant topic.

“Before, when we used the wiki, even people internally were reluctant to go to the documentation. Now teams are reading the documentation and giving us feedback without us even asking for it,” Nicolas observes. “We’re finding that our Flare-based portal is used for everything, both externally and internally. That’s a really nice achievement for us since it’s the main reference on how to use our solution.”