Online Shop
METRO
METRO Austria is one of the country's leading wholesale companies and part of international METRO AG. The company supplies restaurants, hotels and businesses with a wide range of over 70,000 items — from food to beverages to ZUNON food products.
A stable solution
kraftwerk took over the existing METRO web shop, which was originally based on a software solution (recipe database) not designed for e-commerce. Data was exchanged with the backend via unstable XML interfaces, which regularly led to errors in data processing and pricing.
The aim of the project was the technological stabilization, modernization and scaling of the system — with a simultaneously growing amount of data and a complex pricing structure (customer-specific prices per location, action and product). The web solution was technically redesigned, the frontend was completely redesigned and the user interface was optimized.
As part of this, the product catalog was restructured and the search logic was fundamentally revised: First, the search was ported to Apache Solr and expanded to include synonyms and fuzzy search, in order to deliver relevant results even if entries were inaccurate. In a further step, the migration to Elasticsearch took place, which significantly accelerated both product overviews and search queries.
No items found.
More performance
To improve performance, sequential data import was converted to a parallel import process via RabbitMQ. As a result, the processing of large amounts of data including individual price logics, could be accelerated many times over. In addition, a dynamic, faceted product filter was developed, which enables customers to search for specific and intuitive products.
The mobile app was also modernized: The existing solution was ported to a Xamarin multi-platform and later migrated to the future-proof .NET MAUI framework. Features such as offline mode and barcode scan have been retained and improved.
The solution proved particularly effective during the COVID-19 pandemic: The integration of flexible delivery options made it possible to open up new customer segments including the ability to send smaller quantities of 150€ or more to SMEs.
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