CHALLENGE
BestValue.eu started as a project in 2015, a key turning point in the e-commerce industry: almost all well established e-commerce platforms based on PHP were undergoing massive rewrite or waiting for a big release.
Magento 2.0 was launched in late November, Prestashop 1.7 was a year away from being launched and other options lacked many of the key advantages we required:
The main business objective of BestValue was to provide the same experience online as they offer to customers at the airport shops they operate at. Perfumes and cosmetics are products with multiple variants of color or size. They had to give customers the right alternative for their needs: skin color for cosmetics or quantity for perfumes.
In order to do that, they had to be vetted by the brands they worked with and ensure only passengers with valid plane ticket could get travel retail pricing.
SOLUTION
With previous experience in Symfony development, it was very easy for the development team to understand this platform and use it in their advantage.
From the very beginning they planned to use a cloud computing provided by Google. Once again, Sylius with the integration with the KNP Labs’ Gaufrette Bundle, Liip’s Imagine Bundle and Doctrine (Redis) Cache helped them ensure all assets were hosted on CDN (Content Delivery Network) and the team could use disposable virtual machines that scaled according to their needs.
The checkout flow was easily customizable with Sylius. That allowed the team to experiment with various integrations of the ticket validation form.
Also, the integration with Enqueue Library helped them decouple non-critical processes from the main browser request of users.
« We were amazed about the quality of the codebase and how easily we were able to customize it to our needs ».
RESULTS
They got over 2 millions page views in a 24h timespan, handling over 100.000 write requests with Sylius Grid & Resource bundle, with a peak of over 2.000 requests per second.
The BestValue development team admits though, one of the most appreciated lessons they learned from Sylius was probably the mix of Behat, Gherkin, Sylius Resource Bundle, Grid and State Machines. Thanks to the platform, they started using Gherkin as a common language between development and business departments such as marketing or logistics, Behat to automate the execution of the scenarios and Resource + Grid + State Machines for rapid development.
Sylius Promotions is also one of the functionalities heavily used at BestValue. The simplicity of the implementation makes it perfect for any kind of promotions, no matter how ingenious the marketing ideas are.
