Scaling to 13 countries with content-first commerce architecture

By the time Fusonic brought Sulu on board, they had already worked with mofakult for over five years to build and maintain their initial independent e-commerce platform. When Magento 1.9 reached its end of life, Fusonic continued to maintain the platform but knew there was no longer a viable upgrade path. They also recognized that mofakult would soon outgrow Magento's limitations and would need a less monolithic solution.

Mofakult’s new platform needed to support 13 country domains and two customer groups, B2C and B2B. The interface needed to localize four languages and adapt pricing and content offerings to local market contexts, all while working from a single system that could continue to scale with the company. The stakes were high: in a business this size, a single payment or tracking bug can cost thousands in a day. Over 2.5 years, Sulu worked with Fusonic and the rest of the project partners to build a complex system that editors can easily modify without that risk, and a digital experience that ensures each customer finds what they need without ever seeing the complexity firsthand.

Fusonic set out to find “best-of-breed” partners, and truly headless options: a backend content and localization layer that makes no assumptions about how or where content will be rendered. The CMS also needed to integrate with the commerce engine Sylius and an Angular SSR frontend via APIs, so future scaling efforts wouldn’t require working around forced compromise or finicky coupling. That ruled out most of the field. As Fusonic Product Owner Philipp Schuler says, “Headless-ready sounds great in a vendor pitch. In reality, it usually means: there's API documentation. That's it.” 

Existing Sulu Technology Partner, Sylius, recommended Sulu as a truly headless, fully open source option suited to building a modular service. Fusonic recognized that Sulu’s multilingual features and proven integration with Sylius made it an ideal choice for an international CMS. 

The end result is a Sylius commerce engine coupled with a Comarch ERP that houses all product and category data. The frontend is an Angular single-page app with server-side rendering. Sulu is the CMS that manages all content, SEO, and localization. Systems communicate via APIs and a RabbitMQ message broker, and the entire platform runs on AWS Kubernetes with autoscaling. Housing content and product indexing within Sulu cut load times from around three seconds on the old platform to under 100ms. And content blocks in Sulu can be configured for language independently of country, so regions like Switzerland and Germany that share a language can see the same content without requiring separate versions, see screenshot below.  

Fusonic's primary concern was the long-term viability of mofakult's new digital platform. Sulu's modular design and ability to operate within a distributed architecture meant the team didn't have to make compromises elsewhere in the stack. Fusonic didn’t have to design components around what might work best with the CMS; Sulu's proven compatibility with Sylius, along with its capacity for customization and scaling, meant mofakult could stay focused on what works best for customers.  

Each component scales independently of the others, and the full redesign allows for continued flexibility and maintenance so the platform can continue to grow with mofakult. That growth started immediately: revenue rose 10% directly after launch, and the platform saw an 83% increase in new customers within the first twelve months. It has since been extended with Kultklub, a loyalty program that has further driven customer engagement and is managed within the same content architecture. What started as a replacement for an end-of-life monolith is now a foundation mofakult can keep building on.   

Contact Sulu to build a system that puts your customer in front of the content they need.