Planeta Huerto (part of the Carrefour Group) is the largest Spanish online retailer based in Alicante, Spain, created at the end of 2011 by brothers Pablo and Alfonso Sanchez. In ten years, it has established itself as the undisputed leader in Spain and Portugal in online sales of eco-friendly, organic, healthy, and sustainable products. Planet Huerto became part of the Carrefour Group after being acquired by Greenweez.
Planeta Huerto currently has more than 816 000 customers, 37 000 products reviews, and more than 35 000 products classified into a few main categories: the organic supermarket and products that customers can use to grow and produce themselves at home. The company is well known for the excellence of its service and the high-quality advice and content that it delivers to its customers to adopt healthier and environmentally-friendly lifestyles.
They hired us to help to replace the custom shop subsystem with a Sylius-based solution. The old, custom shop has limited functionalities. There was no space for marketing support as product placement articles or supporting sales with promotions and special offers. The client wanted to connect a blog platform that is a place where there is widespread knowledge about products and a place to support sales and advertise. According to eCommerce trends, there was also a big issue with using the old application on mobile devices. It was working very slow, and there were problems with displaying information which lowers the satisfaction of users and usability of the webshop. Last but not least, it was hard to find developers who would be able to work on a custom solution, support it, and expand its functionalities and features. The custom shop did not provide an API.
The user experience was also poor on the admin site: unintuitive management of shipping methods, costs for administration, management of coupons, and promotions were quite problematic.
The client came to us with the decision to use Sylius as a first step. Next, we looked through our existing plugins to save time during development. It became clear that the solution will need further customizations, but most features are already covered by existing open- and closed-source plugins.
Next, we prepared the first version of Sylius shop with plugins installed and API documentation through Postman examples so the front-end development could be started. It allowed us to find any problems or misconceptions as soon as possible, discuss them, and find proper solutions that we would implement in the future.
After a few months of cooperation, it appears a new system will soon be able to replace the old one. Basing our work on Sylius, Pimcore, and existing plugins allowed Us to save some time – our client got a very advanced eCommerce system that manages:
Our backend work was integrated with the client’s new frontend – and created a complete solution for the whole platform. We have solved all problems mentioned above – the shop works excellent on desktops, tablets or phones. Used solutions allow for easy handling of many clients and easy extension by adding or modifying new functionalities in the future.
