For the last three consecutive years, PLUS Supermarkets was named the Best National Grocer in the Netherlands for its quality, product assortment, store appearance, staff, and shopping convenience. But its digital shopping experience was lagging behind.
Their monolithic commerce platform showed its limitations as their eCommerce grew, affecting both revenue and innovation. As their trusted digital partner, we jumped in to develop a new eCommerce platform to improve stability, scalability, and time-to-market. Together, we made the bold choice to combine OutSystems, commercetools, and Contentful – the first time anyone put these leading systems together.
During the last years, more and more customers saw the benefits of
home delivery of groceries, which offered consumers a lot of ease and
convenience.. To realize further digital growth, PLUS put a strong focus
on its omnichannel proposition. However, their eCommerce platform
started to show its limitations. As a monolithic platform, it couldn’t
handle the swift growth in demand, resulting in serious performance
issues that impacted the eCommerce revenue negatively. PLUS decided in
2021 that it was time for a new eCommerce platform, one that offered
stability, better performance and a faster time-to-market. The retailer
asked us to help decide and develop the architecture on both front and
back-end that could meet its ambitions.
1 webshop became 6 projects
OutSystems had never been used as the heart of a composable eCommerce platform serving hundreds of thousands of active customers before. This required a highly innovative approach in close collaboration with PLUS. Challenge accepted. Meanwhile, PLUS realized that this would also be a good moment to address its challenges with the data landscape. The use of Intershop resulted in thirteen different data systems that updated Intershop once a day. Updating the online search results took another day, resulting in a painful two-day delay. Taking data along increased the project scope significantly, which resulted in a program covering six separate projects. These included the data infrastructure, a retail management portal, the CMS, the eCommerce engine and two separate front ends.
Next-level commerce
The unique composable combination of OutSystems, commercetools and Contentful enables PLUS to create next-level shopping experiences that are accessible, convenient and differentiating. Combined, the three solutions guarantee an uptime of 99,99%, taking away previous stability issues. Performance is ensured by automatic data-driven scaling services. Adding new functionalities such as voice or barcode search was added in a single two-week sprint, which previously would take at least two months. That flexibility provides the fast time-to-market that PLUS was looking for.
"The reason why we opted for a combination of headless and composable architecture has to do with the nature of our organizational demand. With more than 400 stores - largely led by entrepreneurs - we want to maintain a lot of flexibility in facilitating customer demands at a micro store level. With our composable architecture, we have selected the best-of-breed applications that currently suit us. For example, if we want to focus on broader diversity in promotional communications at store level later this year, we can easily and quickly replace an application in the landscape without running the risk of instability in our core business with impact on our customer journey. With our architecture that combines headless and composable, we are one of the first food retailers in Europe to fully implemented this. Something to be proud of’’
"The reason why we opted for a combination of headless and composable architecture has to do with the nature of our organizational demand. With more than 500 stores - largely led by entrepreneurs - we want to maintain a lot of flexibility in facilitating customer demands at a micro-store level."
Agility enables digital success
The new webshop went live in February 2024. With a year-on-year growth in both market share and online revenue, PLUS can expect a fast ROI, as the switch from a monolithic to a composable architecture also impacts the total cost of ownership. For instance, the cost of changing a product drops significantly when updating is not hindered by irregular release cycles. The new architecture will allow PLUS to further grow its eCommerce revenue by improving the customer experience through rapid innovation and value creation.
‘Product League helps solve our business issues’
“Product League is our strategic digital partner that helps to accelerate our digital transformation and builds what we can’t buy. They understand how business and IT intersect, and they build solutions for us that address and solve business issues. For our new eCommerce platform, they guided us through the process of Build vs. Buy to select the best-fitting solutions for our digital ambitions. The people of Product League are very pragmatic and experts in technology for back-end and front-end facing applications, a perfect fit with PLUS Retail on our turbulent journey through digital transformation.”
"With the growth in the number of stores and thereby the number
of pickup and delivery points, we anticipate an increasing demand for
omnichannel shopping from both existing and new customers of PLUS. This
new platform enables us to more precisely cater to their needs in the
future." - Stephan Bosman, Head of Digital & eCommerce
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