Carrefour Marketplace

Executive summary 

The biggest retailer in Europe launched its Romanian unique portal which brought together all existing online projects, as well as a new marketplace system. This is a new and continuously evolving project which fuses carrefour-online.ro shop, carrefour.ro institutional web site, the retailer’s own apparel brand Tex, tex.carrefour.ro, and the employer branding website — lumea-carrefour.ro — into one customer-centric experience.

The client 

Carrefour is one of the largest hypermarket chains in the world, having close to 1600 hypermarkets and operating in more than 30 countries. Carrefour offers its customers in Romania multiple shopping channels both through its 320 brick-and-mortar shops around the country and its online portal www.carefour.ro. In addition, via the Bringo platform, available free of charge in Google Play and App Store, Carrefour offers its customers in Iasi, Bucuresti, Cluj, and Constanta over 50,000 products at hypermarket prices with a 90-min. delivery time.

Business Challenge 

For developing the new portal, Tremend employed advanced technologies to solve some complex problems regarding the integration of the online Carrefour systems and the offline ones created for taking the orders and preparing them in the hypermarkets.

Solution delivered by Tremend 

Dedicated Scrum teams have designed and built the solution to integrate all the independent projects (carrefour-online.ro, tex.carrefour.ro, lumea-carrefour.ro and carrefour.ro – the corporate website) under the unique portal carrefour.ro, with two main technical components:

• The Marketplace system – based on Magento 2 with Elasticsearch and Redis
• The unified service – developed from scratch on top of Symfony, for cart & checkout.

Migration to GCP:

• Provisioning & configuration management: Terraform, Ansible
• Highly available, multi-zone deployment
• Deployment: Kubernetes (GKE), Compute Engine, LB, CloudSQL, Memorystore
• CI / CD: Bitbucket, Bamboo
• Monitoring: Prometheus, NewRelic, Nagios, ELK
   

Performance tests ensured the solution would deliver the intended traffic requirements. Security penetration testing made sure the solution can be safely launched.

Expertise required:  eCommerce, Microservices, scalable traffic solution, Node, Magento 2, Symfony3, Angular, Angular Material, Django, Golang, UX, design, CI/CD, Automated QA, Bare Metal Cloud, Google Cloud, Rancher, Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes

Results 

Tremend delivered a complex architecture based on Magento2 that allowed Carrefour to catch up on a mature market segment.

The development was a big challenge from the scalability and total accessibility point of view. It reunites tens of Carrefour partners, over 150.000 SKU, and an ever-growing number of end-users. The products ordered online can be delivered anywhere in the country or picked up at any Click & Collect point in the Carrefour hypermarkets. This is a first for an FMCG retailer.