Santafoo is a new player in the grocery delivery market in Marseille France. As of 2021 Gorillas, Flink, and UberEats are already active in the second-largest city in France. What inspired Laurent Salet, the founder of Santafoo, to foresee success?
Laurent is not new in this business. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with a successful exit, providing add-on services for supermarkets such as allowing customers to change their coins into vouchers. He sold his company to an American company called Coinstar 2018. As he closely worked with supermarket branches as well as their customers, he noticed that customers are often seeking more local, quality, and sustainable choices. However such products are not necessarily available at conventional supermarket chains. Customers know where to find real deals, like perfectly ripped cheese, beautiful wines from the hills of Provance, and cured lamb from the Southern French Alps. These products are available on the weekend market brought by specialized merchants. Otherwise, customer has to visit their local shops scattered around the city.
Santafoo has a clear goal: to bring local, fresh, gourmet products to consumers in central Marseille just in 15 minutes. They partner up with more than 20 delicacy vendors in the regions ranging from cheese to beer from bread to wine. Furthermore, they include essential products for the target audience of young, educated middle-high income families such as baby, beautify, and cleaning products. Busy city dwellers can schedule their delivery time in advance, so they can enjoy fresh products at competitive prices for their weekend dinner meals.
First and foremost, Santafoo wants to achieve a compelling customer experience. A sleek and fast mobile app, that allows customers to order products is a must-have. On the other side of the picture, the warehouse should be ready to receive orders and deliver products within 30 minutes for Express delivery. If a customer chooses scheduled delivery, they plan the delivery during the chosen time slot. The flow of orders has to be connected with SAP Business One, the ERP system of Santafoo, and the flow of product info has to feed back to the app. In between these two ends, product data needs to be enriched, and delivery couriers have to be managed on time.
To meet those requirements Aarini team investigated the best eCommerce architecture. The right solution must be scaleable to meet growing demands, platform agonistic to integrate with the best breeds of SaaS commerce tools, and flexible to feed multiple frontends both web and apps. Going for MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud native, Headless interface) architecture seems the right approach instead of locking us in one monolithic solution such as Magento or Shopify. MACH architecture will allow Santafoo to choose the best cloud basis commerce tools in the market, save time to develop solutions, and continue to improve & scale the system.
What’s delivered?
What’s learned?
Headless eCommerce can empower SMEs with SAP Business One to achieve the most competitive technology and excellent customer experience.
