A Renewed Ecommerce for a Crisis-Proof Shopping Experience

Natura is a retail brand of fashion and home goods with a multicultural spirit that was founded in 1992. Now, after years of expansion, the business has over 200 stores in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Andorra. Additionally, a portion of the profits is allocated to fund environmental and social projects.

In early 2020, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic accelerated a shift in consumer shopping habits, forcing them to turn to e-commerce due to the closure of physical stores. In this context, Natura, which had just launched its new website, faced the challenge of continuing to invest in ecommerce, its only sales channel for months, to meet this growing demand.

To achieve this, the company needed a reliable technological development team specialized in ecommerce that could implement the new design layer of the platform, created by the Firma team, with stable minimum functionalities in just two months.

Co-creating the Best Solution

In this emergency situation, we applied the Agile methodology, working in iterative incremental cycles of two weeks, called sprints, with functioning product deliveries. In each sprint, the development and design team holds meetings with the client where we align and co-create the best solution. At the end of the two weeks, we present a demo to the client to show the functioning product and proceed to validation.

By integrating Natura into the entire process, we were able to continuously adapt to their needs and reach a consensus in an agile manner to minimize the time to market.

Unlike waterfall methods, which plan the work from the beginning without room for unforeseen events, the Agile methodology can respond to the priorities of each moment without compromising the project.

An Architecture Adapted to Needs

Technically, we had to think of a highly scalable and iterable architecture, with an automated continuous deployment system, as the online sales channel product constantly changes and the fashion sector's needs as well.

Our major challenge, in this sense, was aligning with the product roadmap of Sylius, an Open Source ecommerce platform for developers with great adaptability to Natura's needs. We opted to forgo custom-made features to find solutions that adapted to the new version of Sylius, which is easier to maintain.

Within our methodology, we use the code version management system (GIT) to record changes made to files, the virtualization of development environments in virtual machines with Vagrant, and automated continuous integration deployments with Jenkins. Thanks to these tools, the team can deploy the functional and improved product in the production environment (final web) periodically and in a controlled manner with quality assurance.

The Sylius ecommerce platform is developed with Symfony, a PHP framework we have been working with for over 10 years. Additionally, the system is supported by the Algolia search platform, which, thanks to its content indices, allows us to search the entire product database very quickly and instantly, thus improving the user's search experience.

Due to its flexibility, Sylius was the ideal solution for a project that required the implementation of processes different from standard projects, as was the case with Natura.

Results in Figures

We have implemented Natura's multichannel sales with a new ecommerce user experience that allows the company to sell products internationally by adapting the price and purchase characteristics for each region.

The launch of Natura's new ecommerce in March 2020, during the confinement phase, had an immediate response. Sales grew by 277% compared to the previous month; the number of orders also increased by 228% and the average ticket by 15%. On the other hand, we managed to reduce the average loading time of the brand's website by 33%.

This remarkable achievement encourages us to continue working on finding solutions for clients who need a quality product with quick results thanks to the flexibility provided by a methodology like Agile.