An agile, high-performance omnichannel solution to support exponential growth

The need: a platform that matches Ekosport’s ambition

Ekosport has experienced rapid revenue growth, driven by

• A marketing expansion (advertising, opening brick-and-mortar stores) to become the No. 1 outdoor retailer in France
• Diversifying the offerings (cycling, rock climbing, running, etc.) to reduce seasonality and expand its market

However, the technical debt that had accumulated on its legacy Intershop platform (deployed in 2014) limited its agility, impacted its time-to-market, and was no longer able to adequately support its digital ambitions.

Our Approach: Agility, Innovation, and Industry Expertise

To address these challenges and meet deadlines, we implemented an Extreme Programming/Agile methodology, with a dedicated team of 15 experts (developers, architects, QA specialists, etc.) to support the five Product Owners on the Ekosport side.

PIM at the Heart of the Product Strategy

The Pimcore platform centralizes product data (120,000 attributes, 50,000+ images) to optimize time-to-market, particularly when adding new categories and products with shorter lifecycles.

Business logic has been integrated into the PIM.

Therefore, compatibility constraints regarding skis and ski types must be taken into account. The compatibility rules governing ski packages are stored and defined in the PIM and interpreted dynamically on the e-commerce site.

Finally, the PIM has made it possible to quickly add new categories, such as cycling and rock climbing, and handles short-lived products perfectly

A headless redesign of the e-commerce platform

To ensure optimal performance and maximum mobile compatibility, the decision was made to switch to a headless site, using the PWA offered by Intershop. This native solution was chosen over a custom front end in order to meet the mid-September deadline.

To boost SEO and the user experience (with its instant search), the Algolia engine has replaced SOLR for the site’s search functionality. Choosing Algolia saved one month of implementation time on the headless front end. Product recommendations were rolled out gradually.

Based on the data and constraints entered into the PIM, the e-commerce platform generates more than 30,000 virtual SKUs for ski packages. The configuration forms have been gradually improved.

All 11 countries on the Ekosport platform were migrated within three weeks, with no disruption to operations (setup and configuration were carried out in parallel to meet the tight deadline).

Omnichannel and Connectivity

During the rollout of the Open Bravo ERP system, the back office of the previous version of the site was retained to minimize disruption.

All workflows have been adapted, and the Intershop back end has been connected via API to the ERP and PIM systems to enable real-time management.

Omnichannel mode has been enabled with the rollout of physical stores (Click & Collect, in-store order management, etc.)