Seamless Online Shopping Transformation

With its 100 stores catering to farmers and consumers in Norway, Felleskjøpet is the most important supplier of technology and resources to Norwegian agriculture. For 125 years, Felleskjøpet has ensured deliveries of both raw materials, products, and services to Norwegian farmers.

Ever since Felleskjøpet's acquisition of the Swedish company Granngården back in 2016, the demand for online commerce has consistently risen, prompting the need to establish a unified cloud-based e-commerce platform for both Felleskjopet.no and Granngarden.se.

Granngården wanted a brand new website where the key focus was to meet user needs, strengthen the position as a competence provider, and boost the conversion rate - a beautiful ambition and challenge! The goal was also to improve the shopping experience, making it easier for customers to find what they are looking for both in physical and digital stores.

During the development of the e-commerce platform, our compainies Northern Beat, Epinova, and Novanet collaborated as a service provider.

Northern Beat was responsible for collecting insights. Insight, as in most projects, has been crucial to make the right choices along the way. Insights was gathered through employees, the market, customers, and customer service during the project. Together with Granngården, the choice was made to create a "smart" online store that provides users with helpful advice along the way. Northern Beat was responsible for the entire UX work and worked closely with Epinova and Novanet to implement the solutions.

Epinova has delivered the digital service platform built up of separate microservices to more easily connect the new solution to Felleskjøpet's existing and upcoming business systems. This allows the solution to provide the same shopping experience across platforms. The online store is build on a combination of Microsoft Retail server and Optimizely Commerce.

The first phase of the project was to revamp granngarden.se and migrate it to a new platform. In March 2021, the solution went live with a beta version.

Apptus is a central part of the solution related to personalization. Eg. a farmer and a dog breeder will experience the website differently. Product recommendations, search results, and category prioritization are tailored to the end user's usage patterns.

Riversand is used for product management, media libraries, and master data. This PIM/DAM/MDM solution is also connected to the service platform. The service ensures that product data is always up-to-date. Riversand also manages the media library and master data, including store information and other information that can be distributed across all channels to Felleskjøpet.

NOVA collaborates across disciplines as a complete interdisciplinary provider. Novanet, with expertise in system development and architecture, was involved in the final phase of the project, assisting with bug fixing, optimization, and the development of integrations with external services such as Klarna, Unifaun, and Google/Facebook Commerce.

Granngården's customers can now shop more smoothly online with Klarna, something they previously could only offer in physical stores. Granngården's e-commerce deliveries are sent from the store's warehouses, the central warehouse, and directly from suppliers through the Unifaun shipping engine. A complex system that provides access to all the company's products and inventory.

The project was carried out in collaboration with Apptus, Riversand, and our companies Epinova, Northern Beat, and Novanet.