A 16-month major project instead of a 6-month MVP. And everyone is happy.

Interquell Petfood is a leading provider of high-quality pet food, dedicated to the health and wellbeing of dogs and cats. With its four brands Happy Dog, Happy Cat, Goood and FischFit, the company feeds millions of dogs, cats and fish every day. Through its online shops Goood-Petfood.de, Happydog.de and Happycat.de, the company has built a loyal community, both in the consumer business and in the B2B segment, for example with veterinarians, breeders and retailers.

The manufacturer's previous shops had grown dated: they ran on Shopware 5, a platform whose life cycle was approaching its end and which, in the medium term, no longer offered a stable, updatable solution. For Interquell one thing was clear: it needed a modern architecture with better performance, leaner workflows and long-term update capability. On top of that, the company was planning to roll out a new ERP system (Xentral) and to build a custom loyalty world, an ambitious undertaking that brought together many teams, systems and requirements. "You can picture this project like a bridge being built toward each other from both ends in two sections", explains Sabine Götz, Lead Consultant New Business at Shopmacher. "The art lies in meeting each other with real precision in the end."

Since the old shops were only running unstably, they were meant to be replaced within six months by a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). After a brief health check of the existing tech stack by Shopmacher, however, it turned out that the sites could be stabilized with minimal effort so that they could at least keep running safely for a while. "That bought us time to plan the whole project cleanly", explains Sabine Götz, Lead Consultant New Business at Shopmacher. "Instead of pulling off a rushed job, we could calmly question, streamline and optimize all systems and their processes and workflows."

This time was well invested, because the requirements for the new shops were varied. They were meant not only to consider the needs of pet owners but also to make collaboration with B2B customers such as veterinarians, breeders, retailers or dog schools easier, and not just in Germany but internationally across a total of 15 channels, from Great Britain via Indonesia to Hungary. For example, an automated approval process for prescription products such as special food was to be implemented with veterinarians.

A particular focus in the project was on the content management system. Because it was important to the pet food provider to be able to address its different target groups individually in the shop. In addition, individual role and permission structures had to be set up for the many international teams. Despite the complex requirements, the project partners jointly decided on an unusual but pragmatic step: the previous content management system was switched off, despite its immense range of functions, and replaced with the integrated CMS of Shopware 6. "With the old CMS, the caching in particular was not implemented cleanly", explains Sabine Götz. "This made the shop very slow. To fix the problem, we would have had to set up the caching completely from scratch."

On top of that, the integrated content management system of Shopware 6 had a major USP in the eyes of those responsible: through the direct connection to the Rule Builder, a tool for automatically controlling various business rules and processes, workflows can be made more efficient and better coordinated. This includes, for example, discount campaigns, adjusting shipping costs depending on delivery location or cart, product availability displays for specific customer groups, or the dynamic adjustment of the available payment options.

Another strategic focus was the introduction of a loyalty world. After thoroughly evaluating all available solutions, Interquell Petfood chose the promotion engine Talon.One. "During the requirements gathering we saw that the company uses many promotions, some of them unusual", says Sabine Götz. "It's not impossible to do all of that with Shopware too, but there was still the risk that we might not be able to map one campaign or another that way and would then have to develop it in an elaborate and error-prone manner. By implementing Talon we created a toolbox that lets us easily realize any crazy campaign, today and in the future."

The original six-month MVP ultimately became a 16-month major project, with a happy ending. Workflows were automated, processes were streamlined and stabilized, order handling was made easier, shop management was simplified and customer loyalty was raised to a new level. The connection to Xentral also went without complications. In Sabine Götz's view, the fact that the collaboration worked so smoothly is above all down to perfect teamwork and a sense of realism: "In a project this long, time keeps moving, and faster than you'd like", she says. "There are new requirements from stakeholders or external influences that seem to come out of nowhere. The point here is to weigh things up well and follow the guiding star of the vision with a certain pragmatism."

There are already plans for the further expansion of the shops. A Product Information Management system is to be introduced to improve the quality of the product data, there are new ideas for the loyalty program, and internationalization is to be driven forward further too. Pragmatism and a sense of realism will be needed here as well.