EUROAPOTHECA is an international group that owns over 796 pharmacies in Lithuania, Sweden, Latvia and Estonia. The group controls pharmacy chain Eurovaistinė in Lithuania, Euroaptieka in Latvia, operates Euroapteek franchise network in Estonia, and has 50% shareholding in Swedish Pharmacy Holding AB, which controls pharmacy chains Apoteksgruppen and Kronans Apotek in Sweden.
EUROAPOTHECA is a member of “Vilniaus Prekyba” – private holding company which oversees, controls and manages the group of subsidiary companies operating the chains of retail stores, pharmacies and real estate development and management companies in the Baltic States, Sweden, Poland and Bulgaria.
The Lithuanian online pharmacy Eurovaistine.lt was built on Oxid, a PHP based ecommerce platform. The platform’s licensing policy wasn’t flexible enough and adapted to Eurovaistine.lt’s growing business needs. Oxid also didn’t provide best practices in terms of security and time-to-market. The pharmacy chain needed a new ecommerce platform, a platform that could help increase conversion rate and ensure possibility for expansion to other countries. That’s when Sylius’ solution partner, Baltic Amadeus, came to the rescue and successfully migrated the online pharmacy to Sylius.
One of main challenges when it came to choosing a new ecommerce solution was a users’ data migration. Eurovaistine.lt wanted to implement a co-existence period for both the old and the new platform to ensure a smooth transition. Baltic Amadeus chose Sylius as a perfect fit for the online pharmacy, mainly because of its flexible code basis, performance, and security. As Sylius is based on the Symfony framework, it is easier for developers to ensure appropriate security and solution architecture principles.
If it comes to combining our clients’ needs and business goals — Sylius is here to bring the most value to eCommerce demands. The platform is based on the Symfony framework, helping us find highly skilled developers easier. I strongly recommend Sylius to clients with various needs.
The new, Sylius-based ecommerce website can easily keep up with Eurovaistine.lt’s needs for new functionalities, such as same day delivery that Baltic Amadeus implemented during COVID-19 peak.
Migrating to Sylius helped Eurovaistine.lt to deal with platform stability issues which appeared while growing the business – the previous platform often suffered from system’s downtimes which resulted in lost customers and transactions. Now the store is capable to manage the traffic at extremely high peaks such as COVID-19 lockdowns back in 2020 and 2021, when the physical pharmacies had restrictions with customer traffic. The system’s architecture has been improved to achieve greater resilience, flexibility, and accelerate deployments in new markets.
We’re glad to have Baltic Amadeus as our technology partner that is always ready to find the sweet spot between our needs and suitable technological decision. Most importantly, they deliver IT solutions that enables our business growth not having technical limitation of platform.
