New Cloud-Native E-Commerce Solution Implementation

Customer

TROBOS is a virtual fast shopping space enabling buyers to transfer their shopping habits from physical shops into one website, which is accessible from a computer or a smartphone. The company is currently providing its services in Vilnius and is soon to roll out its virtual doors in Kaunas, Klaipėda, and Šiauliai. The company is owned by “Vilniaus prekyba” group of companies.

Overview
Shopping online has been around for quite a while, yet the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected our shopping habits. TROBOS has explored the idea of offering a tangible alternative to the physical experience of visiting a shopping mall in the online virtual world.
TROBOS chose Google Cloud Platform as a launchpad of its new solution for providing a high quality of service for its customers.

The Challenge
TROBOS wanted to give Lithuanians the possibility to do their shopping safely and in a user-friendly way during the pandemic. As the majority of traders couldn’t carry out their commercial activities physically, TROBOS aimed to help them resume their operations as quickly as possible.
Due to the situation and an obvious market gap, the e-commerce solution had to be implemented fast. It had to support future growth and a multitude of vendor integrations.

The Solution

The goal was to design a marketplace that was easy to use for both consumers and vendors. To have a solution built on modern architecture and capable of supporting growing customer traffic.
The logical step under the circumstances was to look for flexible bespoke solutions having the necessary business capabilities built-in and Sylius Plus, an enterprise-grade headless commerce platform in tandem with Vue Storefront, a bodiless front-end with a focus on UX and performance, provided a necessary set of features.

TROBOS infrastructure was set up to run on Google Cloud Platform solution for Kubernetes – Google Kubernetes Engine. In addition, a set of Google Cloud managed services was employed, like Cloud Load Balancing, Memorystore for Redis, Cloud SQL, Cloud CDN, and Cloud Storage.
In order to provide a scalable and reliable service, a series of activities were performed in collaboration with TeraSky – the application had to be containerized, configuration optimized, scaling enabled, readiness checks performed, and more cost-effective GCP options chosen and implemented.

The Results

When launched, Trobos offered 26k different goods, and the platform is continuously expanding. A service built on a solid business and technical foundation embracing the latest advancements in the field enabled TROBOS to go to the market at a rapid pace.
Taking advantage of GCP capability to provide high availability and rapid scalability when the need arises is one of the main cornerstones of that foundation. The list of vendors has already grown from the initial 10 to 53, while the list of goods has expanded to over 150k unique items in less than half a year from the launch.

„Quick time-to-market was of vital importance to the success of our business, yet we couldn’t afford to achieve it at the expense of having potential obstacles for further expansion at later stages. Choosing Google Cloud Platform allowed us to reach both goals of seizing the current opportunities all the while enabling sustainable long-term growth.“
Zilvinas Kilius Chief Technology Officer TROBOS.lt

About TROBOS
TROBOS is a virtual fast shopping space enabling buyers to transfer their shopping habits from physical shops into one website accessible from a computer or a smartphone. The company is currently providing its services in Vilnius and is soon to roll out its virtual doors in Kaunas, Klaipėda and Šiauliai. The company is owned by the “Vilniaus prekyba” group of companies, the biggest in the country with 5,3 billion € turnovers and 46 thousand employees. The holding manages a group of market-leading subsidiaries which operate chains of retail (Maxima Grupė), and hardware stores (Ermitažas), pharmacies (Euroapotheka), real estate development (Akropolis Group), e-grocery (Barbora) and many others in the Baltics, Nordics, and the whole CEE region.

Industry:

E-commerce

Products
Google Cloud Platform, GKE, Cloud Load Balancing, Memorystore for Redis, Cloud SQL, Cloud CDN, Cloud Storage.