Feu Vert

Feu Vert is a French chain of car centers and automotive stores with over 50 years of experience. It sells accessories and parts: tires, batteries, oils, filters, multimedia, and more (over 500,000 SKUs), as well as comprehensive car servicing.

When we began our collaboration in 2009, we were asked to create an e-commerce platform for the Polish arm of the company. Within a few years, the e-shop grew to over 20 million in revenue and several hundred thousand transactions annually. Our responsibilities included the development and implementation of the e-shop, as well as ongoing technical support and development. The collaboration ended in 2017 with the sale of the entire Polish business.

When we began work, we assumed the e-shop would be a small e-shop and a supplement to the ongoing operations of the services. In subsequent years, we continued to expand the e-shop in response to the rapid expansion of our product range and market dynamics. Initial work included, in particular:

• We discussed strategic and sales assumptions.
• We discussed product trees and product specifics.
• We analyzed the types and needs of personas.
• We developed a list of views and development functionalities.

Among the unique functionalities we have prepared for implementation, it is worth mentioning:

• Shipments are made from various services across Poland.
• Advanced price list management system for specific customer groups.
• Extensive time-based promotion system, combining products into bundles, and analytics for these promotions.
• Extensive pop-up information publishing system for users, with the ability to set publication times, display lengths, and assign them to specific subpages or product types.

Integrating with ERP is always a challenge. Price lists are updated on request or once a day.

In the initial implementation, we designed 21 unique desktop views and 12 additional screens. As part of the documentation, we first prepared low-fidelity mockups, then fully clickable prototypes of both the pre-login and post-login user views.

The implementation documentation was supplemented by a specification for integration with the client’s ERP – with the client’s IT department playing a significant role in implementing endpoints on the ERP side.

The platform took approximately five months to implement, with the key challenge we encountered being the need to modify the native shopping cart functionality to meet the client’s specific needs.

For implementation purposes, a test version of the ERP was launched, which we integrated with our test environment.

Before being moved to LIVE eCommerce, it underwent a process of supplementing with content and rigorous testing.

• Manual testing in a test environment – we performed testing based on purchase scenarios prepared by the service department.
• Load testing – our server administrator performed speed and load tests, including for information exchange with ERP.
• Price and product display verification.
• After the transition to live, we re-ran the scenario testing in LIVE mode.

We have provided technical support for the system for over six years.

During our development, we maintain high standards of work ethic and knowledge continuity, including:

• Development work is conducted in a 1:1 test environment compared to the LIVE version, integrated with the ERP test environment.
• All graphic changes are first implemented on clickable mockups in Figma, known as masters, and checked for their impact on e-commerce UX.
• We have implemented a key functionality monitoring system that tests e-commerce functionality every hour.
• We maintain a code repository.