Developing an E-Commerce Solution That Detects Fraudulent Activity

Based in Germany, Apetito is a leading provider of catering services in Europe. The customer produces ready-made and frozen meals, both regular and low-calorie. Founded as a family business in 1958, the company now operates in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Brimit became involved in the project through its partnership with Lukkien Media Production, a provider of content production services. Brimit was responsible for delivering a new Sitecore-based website to comply with the customer’s business requirements and needs.

Apetito had a legacy website developed with SharePoint. The outdated technology stack made it difficult to maintain the system and hindered the implementation of new e-commerce modules. The company wanted to be able to easily extend functionality as well as improve performance by migrating to Sitecore Commerce 9.

The requirement was that the time it takes for content to be displayed on a screen should not exceed one second, 500 milliseconds for a cached page, and one second for a dynamic page.

In the course of the project, our team had to deal with the following issues:

• The system should validate a user’s solvency before allowing a credit card payment.
• Daily product synchronization should be ensured, with no loss of information, duplication, or confusion.
• At the time of development, Sitecore Commerce 9, chosen as a core technology behind the new website, had just been released, and there was no official documentation for deploying or fine-tuning critical services.

By building the solution on top of Sitecore, Brimit delivered major e-commerce functionality. A user could now create and manage a personal account, set up various filters (e.g., specify an allergy to a product), search through a product catalog, redeem coupons, etc.

The payment module was integrated with the BlueM gateway and allowed payment by debit or credit card. When using the latter method, the system would validate the information submitted before sending a request to a bank. Brimit integrated the website with Experian to validate a user’s solvency before authorizing a credit card payment. Our team also integrated Postcode NL to validate a user address.

To guarantee daily product synchronization with no data loss or duplication, Brimit customized Sitecore and bound it to the customer’s internal system, which stored up-to-date information, via an API.

Our team worked out an elaborate logic for applying discount coupons based on various parameters.

Brimit deployed a recent release of Sitecore Commerce 9 without official guidelines, and, at our request, the software provider reviewed the code, noting its high quality and customized approach.

Collaborating with Brimit, the customer built a robust e-commerce solution on a modern technology stack, which promotes ease of functionality extension and maintenance. The system is capable of validating users’ solvency before authorizing a credit card payment.

The new website meets the customer’s requirements for performance—loading content on a page in less than a second, on a cached page in less than 500 milliseconds, and on a dynamic page in a second.