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By Druid on
The Kuusamo-based Ruka is one of Finland’s most popular ski resorts, which has garnered also international recognition for its high-quality training and competition facilities as well as for its available activities.
The diversity of the services on offer naturally benefit travelers visiting the area, but it also creates significant challenges to the updatability of the center’s website as well as the functionality of its online shop. The main problems were bad user experience, the lack of proper mobile support, missing integrations that caused loads of manual labor, and that even the smallest changes to the store required software development.
The online store was an outdated custom application. Drupal was previously familiar to Ruka, as the company’s website was built with Drupal 7 and they had experimented with Drupal 8.
Druid was chosen as a partner for building a new online store. The customer and the team chose to use a modern, headless approach to achieve the best possible user experience. The frontend of the online store was built with React whereas Drupal 8 and Commerce 2 were used for content management, integrating the online store to Point of Sale systems and Skidata Access Management software.
In addition, one of the project’s additional goals was to slowly migrate the content from the outdated Drupal 7 website to the new service.
The revamp for Ruka’s webshop began in March 2017, and the first revisions were published the following fall. In addition to technical revisions and interface integrations, the visual look of the website was also updated during the project. The whole project was carried out using the principles of the Scrum work management framework, and the composition of the team changed fluidly according to the project’s needs.
Why Drupal was chosen:
- Open source
- Flexibility
- Customer’s earlier experience with it
- Build-in headless support
- Shop and content management in a single instance
- Availability of contributed modules
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Main goals of the collaboration were:
- Building a modern, scalable online store with support for different types of merchandise such as season and day passes, bus tickets, gift cards and so on
- Setting up an agile workflow for easier, stress-free development
- Improve user experience, especially for mobile devices
- Integrate the online store to other systems, mainly Point of Sales and the Skidata ski lift ticketing and access control
- Improve the overall maintainability of the site allowing the customer to take more responsibility for content management
- Migrate content from existing Drupal 7 website
Druid assembled a team with wide experience in various technologies and started the work. The backend required competence with Drupal 8 and the new Commerce 2 system. The frontend was designed to be a custom application built with React using a GraphQL API for exchanging data with the backend. A fresh, new design was created for the store. With the new design and frontend, the store now supported mobile devices of various sizes and capabilities.
To ensure a smooth transformation to agile development we also trained the client’s product owner into a certified Scrum expert. The Druid team and Ruka’s Product Owner met regularly during the development project and the customer has been an active member of the team.
One of the biggest challenges in building the webshop was integrating Drupal to the ski pass store due to its complexity. When finished the integration saved a lot of manual work as the data was no longer needed to be typed into two separate system as both, the checkout counters and ski lift gates could now read it from a single place.
After the initial project, the work continues. So far, the Drupal 8 application contains the online stores for two ski centers, Ruka and Pyhä, a Blog and skiing gear rental services. More services and content will be added to the application as the work progresses.
The renewed Ruka online store is a lot user-friendlier than before and is significantly easier to maintain. The improved usability increased the volume of mobile transactions by approximately 30%. The total amount of web sales increased by 12% compared to the previous season.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Ruka wants to offer a wider range of payment options. Paytrail covers most of the Finnish payment providers and international credit cards whereas Klarna offers payments by invoice and installment plans.
Commerce is the foundation for the online store and it communicates with the React-based frontend with GraphQL API. Paragraphs and Focal Point are used to allow maximum flexibility in content creation.
Sendwithus allows sending emails with custom templates.
Community contributions:
New contributed modules
- Sendwithus integration (2937872)
- Sendwithus commerce (2946765)
- Klarna Payments module
Commits to existing modules
- Commits to Commerce Paytrail, 158 in total
- Commits to Tupas Authentication, 71 commits in total
- One commit to Tupas Registration
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Sectors:
Sports
Travel and Hospitality
