Our work / Planet Organic

Keeping It Fresh: Award Winning Digital Transformation in 90 days

Planet Organic, the UK’s largest fully certified organic supermarket, has been serving customers the best in organic food and products since 1995. When the pandemic forced them to close their high street stores, they faced a critical challenge: transforming their ecommerce experience to keep supporting customers through lockdown.

With Gradient Edge leading on enterprise architecture, Planet Organic underwent a digital transformation, evolving their ecommerce capabilities into a flexible, robust, and scalable digital commerce platform powered by Shopify Plus.

The Challenge / Brief

During the first lockdown in 2020, Planet Organic's existing ecommerce infrastructure struggled to cope with a surge in online demand, forcing the company to pause online orders. This was frustrating for the team who had worked hard to gain market share over the years. Meanwhile, rival supermarkets thrived as customers shifted their spending online.

With a second lockdown looming, Planet Organic urgently needed:

A reliable short-term solution to handle growing online traffic.
A long-term technology partner to future-proof their ecommerce capabilities.

The goal was clear: deliver a seamless online shopping experience across grocery & healthcare with improved fulfilment, meet increasing customer demand, and keep the business thriving in the absence of in-store trading.

The Approach

To deliver a solution at speed, Shopify Plus was chosen as the foundation platform for its flexibility, scalability and proven reliability under high traffic.

However, the complexity around Planet Organic's market-leading organic grocery and healthcare proposition required significant engineering extensions to the core Shopify Plus platform.

Gradient Edge product-engineered a custom order management system (OMS) to streamline fulfilment and picking processes, significantly improving operational efficiency. This bespoke system ensured Planet Organic could handle orders quickly and accurately, even during peak demand periods.

An enterprise-grade promotions engine with new management tooling was developed to extend the platform's core online promotion capabilities, enabling unified commerce pricing across their online and in-store offering.

Then to support reliable data and enterprise integrations, the team implemented a new event-driven data platform architecture on AWS, allowing seamless integrations with stock, product data, and Planet Organic's ERP system.

The new platform brought together:

A modern, cloud-based architecture,
A new Colleague App and Order Management System (OMS)
Enterprise-level promotion handling, and
An updated suite of marketing tools to drive growth and customer retention.

By combining technical expertise with collaboration across design, marketing, and strategy teams, Gradient Edge delivered a future-ready ecommerce platform.

The Results

Planet Organic's new ecommerce website launched smoothly, meeting an ambitious 12-week timeline - just in time for Black Friday.

Key highlights include:

Record-breaking performance: The site processed its highest-ever volume of online orders within the first month after launch.
Operational efficiency: The custom OMS and Colleague App revolutionised order fulfilment and picking processes.
Seamless integrations: Stock and product data now flow consistently through Planet Organic's enterprise systems, enhancing conversion, stock forecasting and replenishment.

The project not only delivered immediate success but also positioned Planet Organic for long-term growth.

This project was recognised at the 2021 DXA International Digital Experience Awards, winning the Gold Award for 'Best Digital Transformation'. The prize celebrated the project's success in meeting strategic goals, innovation, impact, and execution - all while staying on time and within budget.

By partnering with Gradient Edge and leveraging Shopify Plus, Planet Organic turned a challenging period into an opportunity for growth. Their new, future-proof ecommerce platform has allowed them to better serve customers, improve operations, and drive record-breaking results - keeping it fresh every step of the way.

Record-breaking performance

in the first month after launch

Operational efficiency

for the custom OMS and colleague app used for order fulfilment and picking processes

Seamless integrations

for Stock and product data through Planet Organic's ERP system

Testimonial

Gradient Edge and Profound were key to the whole process – they helped us not just transform digitally, but also transform our thinking, and this has had a direct, positive effect on our strategy and resulting revenue.

The retail sector had a wake-up call when COVID-19 hit and we realised how important having a highly effective ecommerce offering alongside the retail stores had become. It was also an opportunity to seriously advance our online presence by replacing our platform, which was no longer fit for purpose. We needed an immediate fix, coupled with a long-term plan and a partner to guide us and stay with us on the journey. All our decisions were vindicated when we had our best-ever Black Friday sales that we were then able to fulfil on-time.

Alex Hodge | Customer Director, Planet Organic

Technology and tools

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