Matsmart built a grocery business on Drupal Commerce, quickly scaling to €10M's in revenue. Centarro took them fully headless to increase performance and sales.
Case description
Matsmart launched a successful eCommerce business with a mission to reduce food waste. The company developed its initial site as a full stack Drupal Commerce build using its own technical team. Drupal Commerce allowed them to launch and iterate quickly, integrating key systems that allowed them to automate fulfillment of a high volume of small orders. Through successive VC rounds, the company scaled in only a few years to tens of millions of Euros in online sales, raising questions about the long term performance capabilities of Drupal Commerce. At this point, they engaged Centarro first to audit the site and ensure short term scalability and then starting in 2018 to take the site fully headless. For the past year, all of Matsmart's online and app based sales have been powered by headless Drupal Commerce with a React front-end application on the web and a React Native app on mobile interacting with the same Drupal powered API. The transition improved the customer experience, ensured the site never suffered from traffic related outages even in the midst of national marketing campaigns, and enabled Matsmart to launch in new markets even faster than before.
Case goals and results
Matsmarts goals were to support a very high volume of concurrent customers (precise numbers remain proprietary, but it's among the largest volumes we've seen), implement features that improved the customer experience, and prepare the launch to new markets and platforms. While we were able to optimize their existing application, relaunching the site as a headless commerce transaction server with a decoupled front-end was the real game changer. Removing Drupal from the render pipeline, especially with respect to Views and forms, greatly improved front-end performance, and deep integrations to third party services including Findify and Klarna Checkout meant other highly scalable services were on the hook for resource intensive product catalog navigation and actual conversion. Not only has the site not gone down even as overall traffic and the number of markets have scaled, but it's tested to ensure that even the highest flash sale spikes can't bring it down. Matsmart is taking their confidence in the platform into further investments in Drupal even now.
Challenges
Systems integration looks simple on paper, but you're always chasing a moving target. Every upgrade has to be accounted for, and feature expansions in Klarna Checkout in particular have led us to rework our integration multiple times over. While product data models are largely standardized across eCommerce industry solutions, transaction, tax, and promotion data models vary widely. We've had to work closely with multiple vendors to ensure the integration works flawlessly for thousands of concurrent shoppers and across multiple markets
Community contributions
Matsmart has been a major funder of Drupal Commerce related integrations and core features, including many of the last two years' scalability improvements and future REST API improvements. The organization has been very forward about wanting to ensure our work with them is incorporated into the main Drupal Commerce project for the sake of their own business but also for the health of the project and Centarro as their open source software vendor.
Why should this case win the splash awards?
Matsmart is the perfect case of an organization adopting Drupal Commerce, growing with it, and hiring community consultants to take them to the next level through contributions back to the project and ultimately through a whole re-envisioning of what it means to do eCommerce on Drupal in the future. They've been wonderful to work with and very supportive of the community all along.
