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eCommerce + Magento 2

Magento 2-based eCommerce launch scaled business to over 150 stores worldwide

Senetic, an international provider of IT solutions, wished to quickly enter new markets worldwide.

The company was looking for a global, reliable, and flexible platform that would be compatible with solutions already used in their business. The answer was Magento 2 Commerce with the implementation being handled by Divante.

Present on the market for over 10 years, Senetic specializes in providing cloud services as well as top-notch networking devices, servers, and IT software. With their expert knowledge and 27 offices, the company supplies more than 2 million clients each year throughout all regions, including Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

“We support companies around the world with best-in-class products and services while challenging ourselves to always deliver more than expected.” Marcin Białożyt, CEO at Senetic S.A.

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Service

eCommerce

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Technology
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Scope

Digital and eCommerce analytics

Integrations for Magento

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Vertical

IT

01

Why we’re asked to help?

The need for a rapidly-scalable eCommerce solution

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In the initial years of expansion, Senetic was based on a custom eCommerce system developed in-house.

Unfortunately, due to their accelerating growth and new business goals, the existing system wasn’t efficient enough. Senetic had to decide on a new solution. They needed an eCommerce platform that would ensure the stability of business and provide a toolset suitable for entering multiple new markets. The future eCommerce platform had to be flexible and easy to use in order to launch new stores at a relatively low cost and in a short time.

“What we needed was a universal and repeatable solution. It needed to be a solution that we could set up new stores quickly and enter new markets. We work with various widely-available providers, and the new platform had to integrate with their solutions as well.” Łukasz Bojar, Vice President Sales and Marketing at Senetic S.A.

To find the best solution, Senetic decided to get in touch with Divante. Cooperation began at the end of 2017.

02

How did we tackle the tech?

Business analysis phase

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The implementation timeline began with a business analysis phase that lasted over two months.

During multiple meetings and workshops, partners backed by Divante's tech leader, architect, business analyst, and user experience (UX) designer managed to create personas, gathered requirements, and analyzed data migration and integration processes. At the end of this phase, the companies were able to create a business requirements document (BRD) that described the specifics of this project and determined all technical requirements. 

Senetic was looking for an eCommerce platform with:

  • A universal and repeatable eCommerce platform base.
  • Multi-store feature. 
  • A wide range of ready-to-use modules.

Divante proposed Magento 2 Commerce as the most well-suited platform. Used in a wide range of eCommerce projects, Magento proved to be a global, reliable, and flexible solution. On top of that, with the Magento platform, Senetic has access to a marketplace of modules fitting into the global need of markets from the entire world. The question was Magento’s scalability. Senetic had ambitious plans to set up over 150 stores on a single instance of Magento 2 Commerce. To be sure, both partners agreed to examine Magento’s scalability with an MVP version of the store.

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Running the minimum viable product

Work on the MVP focused on the store development for the U.S. market and took around four months. In that time, a Divante team composed of a tech leader, two back-end and front-end developers, a tester, and a project manager (PM) managed to set up the base Magento 2 store and meet all the crucial requirements of Senetic. 

At the same time, efficiency tests were run against the platform’s multi-store features and proved that Magento 2 Commerce is suitable for all Senetic’s needs. 

The first Senetic store, developed in the proof of concept phase, is now available in its full version at www.senetic.com

Seeing the positive results from the MVP version and tests, the companies began to work on the development of other stores. Having a solid base, they repeated the solution on another 21 stores, and in the near future, the solution will be scaled over another 150 stores.

“With a base solution leveraged on Magento 2 Commerce, we were able to work incredibly quickly. The shortest time that we needed to develop and implement a website for a new store was two weeks.” Małgorzata Walankiewicz, Magento Tribe Master and Project Manager at Divante

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The final project scope:

  • Defining client needs.
  • Proposing and testing the solution.
  • Implementing the eCommerce platform, which was Magento version 2.2.7, recently updated to 2.3.1.
  • Integrating with an external product information management (PIM) provider, which was Akeneo.
  • A quick integration.
  • Integrating over 30 extensions.
  • Setting up to release 21 stores in one year.

By the end of 2018, Divante and Senetic had published eight stores in multiple countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. There are also another 13 stores ready for publication and we're still working on stores dedicated to the remaining markets.

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eCommerce technology suitable for quick growth

The final technology stack for Senetic global eCommerce consists of Magento 2 Commerce as the base, Akeneo PIM and Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP integrations, and the Kubernetes cloud solution.

Thanks to Magento 2 Commerce, the Divante team was able to create basic architecture that allows for creating 50 stores in one instance. If needed, they can be supported by modules or customization. These stores, deployed all over the world, can have unique, or the same, domains, catalogs, currencies, prices, taxes, categories, languages, payment methods, and data formats, like currency symbols or date formats.

Integration with Akeneo PIM makes managing categories, product catalogs, and product attributes easier while integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX enterprise resource planning (ERP) simplifies processing orders.
 
“The smart combination of modern technologies, proven tools, and Magento 2 Commerce functionalities lets us build an online shopping platform that can now be launched anywhere in the world regardless of the actual business location. That would be impossible without an excellent technological base.” Marek Borzęcki, Tech Leader at Divante
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The globalization of Senetic eCommerce was achieved by adapting Magento to Divante’s own cloud solution based on Kubernetes, which is located on Microsoft Azure infrastructure.

Kubernetes, as a container orchestration tool, allows companies to scale an application depending on the amount of traffic between nodes. Thanks to this, we're able to optimize the application vertically and horizontally. Proper placement and division of the database and storage is equally important. Taken together, these features allow us to max out Magento’s performance capabilities.

Additionally, Fastly provides a content delivery network (CDN) for Varnish, deploying a cache all over the globe. Senetic stores, no matter where in the world, can return an extremely quick page response.

With such a toolset and close cooperation, Senetic and Divante are able to implement other stores quickly and efficiently.

03

What did we achieve?

Focus on international expansion

The key to the project’s success was excellent analysis and a smart adjustment of the business strategy to the available Magento 2 tools and vice versa. 

The overall implementation of the new Senetic platform presents a multi-store platform with incredible scalability. This is unprecedented in the Magento world. 

Senetic focuses on quick international expansion, and with their new eCommerce platform, they can enter new markets in different continents with a universal and repeatable solution. What’s more, in the future, the company can adapt solutions from different providers because many of them are available as modules on Magento Marketplace.

Apart from the new eCommerce platform, Sentic gained a clearer organizational structure and processes. With this new mindset, the company is ready to present its products to new markets, form delivery hubs in specified regions, and sell them worldwide.

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