Sunology enters 3 European markets in just 1 month with Shopify Plus

The climate crisis and energy issues have now become a major concern for many households. Since its founding in late 2019, Sunology has established itself as the leading brand in Europe committed to democratizing solar energy, making this inexhaustible renewable energy available to everyone, everywhere.

To achieve this energy transition at scale, the company needed to implement a scalable e-commerce solution that matched its ambitions while supporting its rapid growth and international expansion.

With Shopify Plus, Sunology has:

• In just a few days, we launched a customized e-commerce platform.
• In just four weeks, we entered three new European markets.
• We have successfully handled exceptional spikes in demand, up to 13,000 simultaneous shopping carts.

Challenge

In early 2022, the outbreak of a new conflict in Ukraine changed the landscape and destabilized the energy market, causing widespread inflation. This issue quickly turned out to be the main problem of the French population. Vincent Arrouet, CEO and co-founder of Sunology, noted that while 80% of people expressed a desire to go solar, only 3% of them actually made the switch. That’s why Sunology, which seeks to promote this specific form of renewable energy through, among other things, customizable and prefabricated solar power plants, has proven to be the perfect solution to help, educate and reassure both homeowners and renters in making this change. with the goal of equipping “everyone, everywhere” with solar energy, Sunology decided from the beginning to distribute through e-commerce. The company started its mission in 2020 with WordPress and WooCommerce, but quickly ran into issues with flexibility and responsiveness.

Solution

At the end of 2020, during a period of rapid development, the company significantly increased its monthly revenues. It quickly became obvious that WooCommerce would not be able to sustain this long-term growth. The Sunology platform needed a more flexible solution capable of continuous growth and managing higher order volumes, which led to its migration to Shopify and then Shopify Plus. In addition to the many useful features of the platform, Arrouet also considered it the smartest financial choice. Although WordPress is an open source solution with no subscription fees, it has significant additional development and project management costs that would ultimately exceed the price of the Shopify Plus package.

Arrouet also emphasizes the speed of implementation of the Shopify Plus package. Without using pre-established templates, Sunology’s customized platform was ready in just a few days.

Sunology delivers complex and customizable products. Therefore, the use of Shopify Scripts, one of the most powerful applications in the suite, allowed the company to create a configurator to manage bills of materials for custom items. Thanks to this, each customer can design a photovoltaic station precisely tailored to their needs. In addition to streamlining and automating the process, Scripts has also optimized the payment aspect, providing a customized shopping experience.

Shopify Markets, an international Shopify Plus module that helps you identify, configure, launch, optimize and manage different markets from a single store, in line with Sunology’s international growth ambitions. The Localize app, which easily translates store content from one language to another, has also made this expansion much easier.

Finally, the integrated Shopify Payments system has also proven to be a key tool for Sunology. This seamless payment solution works the same way in all countries and includes multi-currency management.

Results

In addition to the significant increase in conversion rates, Arrouet highlights the robustness and scalability of the Shopify Plus suite. After an article about Sunology aired on the popular TV show “Capital” on M6 on October 23, 2022, the company’s website was flooded to the point that shareholders feared the platform would crash. Shopify Plus’s real-time analytics tools recorded over 13,000 open shopping carts on the site at one time. Thanks to Shopify Plus, the increase in demand was managed without any disruptions, and Sunology was able to fulfill every customer request. The company generated revenue of over €500,000 in one day.

However, according to Arrouet, one of the biggest advantages of Shopify Plus is undoubtedly the speed of setup. In addition to the rapid launch of the platform in just 5 days despite the complexity and non-standard nature of the products, the company also managed to easily expand its business internationally. In the summer of 2023, thanks to applications such as Market, Localize and Payments, Sunology automated a significant number of processes and easily adapted its website content to new countries: the company managed to enter the UK, German and Spanish markets in less than four weeks.

With Shopify Plus, Sunology quickly saw results.

• 5 Days quickly developed and launched its initial platform
• 3 countries in 4 weeks expanded their operations to new international markets in record time
• 13 thousand simultaneous shopping baskets were met with an exceptional peak in demand (600,000 euros in revenue in one day)

Thanks to Shopify Plus, Sunology has a tool that meets its ambitions, but company managers are already thinking about what comes next. They plan to soon adopt B2B, a suite of features that enable companies to sell products through an online store, manage aspects such as payment terms and connect multiple customers and locations under a single company profile, should allow Sunology to strengthen its reach and strive to grow it.