Gourmondo - The E-Food Pioneer

How Germany’s First Digital Grocery Retailer is still Revolutionizing the Industry Today

  • The premier online grocery retailer in Germany
  • Leader in online gourmet food trade for 17 years
  • 12.000 + products offered online
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Gourmondo was one of the first online grocery retailers in Germany. The company was founded in 2002, making it an e-food pioneer. Since then, Gourmondo has been one of Germany’s market leaders in the fine food sector. The original idea behind Gourmondo was selling international food via the internet in Germany. Today, Gourmondo is shifting their focus to making exclusive delicacies available to a broader range of customers.

The Initial Situation

As a pioneer in the online gourmet food segment, further development is essential for Gourmondo - not only in terms of assortment, but also in terms of technology. The original 17-year-old shop system was able to meet the demands of early E-commerce and the ‘mobile wave’, but the market developed quickly. The company’s online shop quickly lost customers as new touchpoints and sales channels became more relevant in the customer journey.

Data now plays an ever-increasing role, from purchasing through customer acquisition to existing customer marketing and logistics. The lack of flexibility in the old tech stack coupled with the maintenance and upkeep proved too costly and difficult, as was the further development as the shop overall. That is why Gourmondo decided to switch to the Spryker Commerce OS.

 

 

 

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"The motto today is no longer ‘mobile first’, but ‘customer first’" - Joachim Rabe, CEO Gourmondo Food GmbH

 

The Goals Behind Migrating to Spryker

As an e-commerce pioneer, Gourmondo understands its customers’ needs quite well. However, the requirements changed toward the personalization of both customer journey and product range. The goals behind migrating to the Spryker Commerce OS were better customer-centricity, to attract new customers at a lower cost, as well as increasing the re-purchase rate and purchase frequency.
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Complex Requirements for a Lean System

The requirements Gourmondo has for the Spryker Commerce OS are multifaceted because there are many attributes in the food sector that must be included in the data, storage and delivery process. These include, for example, the minimum shelf-life of products, batches, the various cooling zones in the warehouse and during delivery.
  • It is important for Gourmondo that these processes and attributes are all united in a lean system that can also be expanded, if necessary. The modular architecture of Spryker made it possible to model and adapt all these attributes. Missing elements could be developed in a short time and implemented with the help of Spryker´s Glue API. The Glue API is designed to be used as a contact between the Spryker back-end and any touchpoint, integration, or third-party system.

 

  • The biggest challenge was to connect a whole ecosystem of payment providers, PIM, CRM, ERP, and warehouse management software. Almost all of Gourmondo's external interfaces are based on the Spryker Middleware. It features five stages in which elements are exported and imported: read, verify, associate, translate, and write. This process ensures that all important data is properly and securely imported and integrated.

"Spryker is the spider in the middle of the web, holding together the threads between all the interfaces." - Tobias Schlepphorst, Projektleiter und Head of Consulting, Best IT Group

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"We decided against a largely rigid standard solution because we wanted to control the code and thus of the processes, functionality and speed." - Joachim Rabe, CEO Gourmondo Food GmbH

 

Maximum Flexibility Through Technology Ownership

Gourmondo deliberately chose not to use standard software so that it could preserve the ability at any time to advance and steer processes themselves to keep technical debts as low as possible.

Gourmondo has to make very few compromises with the Spryker Commerce OS - whether it’s the timing of updates or the freedom to decide the direction in which the platform should develop, for example, when it comes to the connection of marketplaces.

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The Spryker State Machine regulates the definition, execution, and visualization of various operations in which certain activities must be performed in a given order and automatic processes initiated. At Gourmondo, it models the order process where an order dispatch is automatically triggered after successful payment processing.

The Spryker B2C Suite as a Foundation

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"The headless architecture of Spryker, with the separation of a simple frontend and intelligent backend, gives us the foundation to respond more quickly and efficiently to the challenges of the young and ever-changing e-food market."  - Joachim Rabe, CEO Gourmondo Food GmbH

The scope of the relaunch did not only include the shop, but the entire infrastructure renewed. The Spryker B2C Suite provided a solid foundation for this, offering modularity, flexibility, and access to code. 

The decoupled capabilities and features of the B2C Suite can be independently extended, and each front-end can be accessed through an API integration. Different front-ends can be set up for different touchpoints or even country-specific shops. The B2C Suite has provided Gourmondo a fast-paced solution, ensuring a smooth launch that is already bearing fruit: There has been a 15-percent shopping cart lift since the launch.
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The E-commerce agency, best it, provides reliable business units for the digitization of business models in B2C and B2B retail. The experts help with complex processes and unmanageable system landscapes through the intelligent use of modern technologies in the fields of PIM, CRM, personalization and commerce frameworks. Based on the modular Spryker B2C Suite and access to the code, best it created the entire Gourmondo infrastructure in just 13 months.

 

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The back-end of the headless Spryker Commerce OS allows every shop front-end, as well as the external systems Akeneo, Ayden, zenloop, dynamic yield, or payment implementations such as Paypal to be combined in one system. The B2C Suite provides Gourmondo with the specific features that combine all the complex requirements of digital food retailing in one lean system.
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