Background

Rob the Gourmets' market is a well-known foodie store in Brussels, offering a wide range of delicacies: over 15.000 products from small and local producers, including meat, fish, cheese, bread, pastry, wine and groceries. To better serve customers – outside of Brussels as well – Rob decided to go digital. The result is a webshop that is fully focused on the customer experience of the real foodie, offering home delivery throughout the country.

PHPro developed a webshop based on Magento, with an online choice of 4.000 products. A specialized partner is responsible for delivery at home. An important element of the project was the integration with Rob’s ERP system which is being enriched with website specific product information by Akeneo, as well as with payment and logistics applications.

Advantage Magento and Akeneo

Due to the familiarity of the tool and the many Magento developers present on the market, Magento gives a certain flexibility. This is because there will not soon be a 'vendor lock-in'. The choice for Magento was therefore made quickly. Another factor ROB was looking for was the balance between possible features and cost price.

The choice for the implementation of Magento Commerce was inspired by Rob's implementation partner PHPro (www.phpro.be). The need for flexibility in the platform to meet specific challenges in the field of food e-commerce was important and Magento is the perfect tool to obtain that flexibility.

Together with PHPro, a product information management (PIM) was also implemented: Akeneo. A connection between Magento and Akeneo was made possible by the 'PIMgento' connection.

An important element in this project was the integration with Rob's ERP system: Microsoft Navision. It was enriched by Akeneo, as well as by payment and logistic applications. These integrations ensure a high quality of product information on Rob's webshop.

The fact that Magento and Akeneo are open source systems was decisive in Rob's choice. This gives them the freedom to further develop their IT architecture and to connect to other systems at all times.

Rob The Gourmets' Market is all about customer experience. That's why the Rob website (via Magento's blog module) also offers inspirational images - and not just products - such as recipes and blog posts. On the website, customers can also register for cooking workshops or in-store wine tastings. Rob is now also much more strongly present on social media where visitors can easily see new products and there are links with additional information.

The project

At the end of September 2017, the delicatessen supermarket Rob The Gourmets' Market launched its webshop. The entire development process took approximately nine months, which is a normal period of time for such more complex projects. PHPro always starts with a thorough analysis, after a few weeks we start with the development in which there is always room for additional analyses and adjustments. Setting up the webshop was quite a job as all products had to be documented with photos, product descriptions, ingredients, nutritional value, allergens, etc. All these data are stored in a Product Information System and Rob did not have this yet.

There are currently more than 4000 products available in Rob's new webshop, such as groceries and fresh products, as well as a wide range of wines. A further 2,000 products will be added in 2018. Thanks to the webshop, Rob can save a lot of time: its user-friendliness ensures a fast, pleasant online shop experience.

Results

The results are encouraging. Despite the somewhat older audience and without a lot of communication, there is a nice monthly growth. There was a good end of year period and the upward trend continues. In total, they see a doubling in their online visitors. Based on customer feedback, the search function has been improved and the repetition of orders has been made possible. In the near future, Rob wants to further expand its online assortment, as well as create and offer product leaflets.