Patyna: Boosting performance for Poland's biggest vintage marketplace

Patyna is Poland's largest vintage marketplace, selling more than 30,000 unique furniture, lighting, decorations, accessories, and more on their platform. The company started in 2013 and has since grown to serve a diverse market of private and B2B customers, such as architects, retailers, and designers. Today, more than 2,000 vendors use the platform to market their vintage furniture, from established wholesalers to local sellers.

Supported by their implementation partner, Rigby, Patyna migrated from WooCommerce to Medusa. With Medusa, Patyna has been able to experiment and build new features faster while spending less time on maintenance and debugging. Along with the migration, Patyna built an admin setup with multiple user types and accesses, custom category control, a mechanism for order splitting, and much more.

34% traffic uplift and 30% shorter time to market

Patyna's team originally built their marketplace using WooCommerce. However, they constantly faced two major challenges: site performance and the release speed of new features. The performance issues stemmed from the platform being bloated with plugins and hacky workarounds, adversely impacting page load time and causing crashes during traffic peaks. Furthermore, vendors experienced considerable load time when making updates to their stores.

The slow development velocity resulted from the team spending too much time on platform maintenance and debugging. The tightly intertwined logic in WooCommerce meant that overriding parts of the system and its plugins could cause problems elsewhere, making root causes hard to identify and debugging a laborious task.

Medusa addressed both of these challenges. Its composable nature allowed Rigby to easily use Next.js to build a custom and performant frontend, resulting in a 34% traffic increase two months after going live. By optimizing CI/CD pipelines, minimizing debugging and maintenance time, and enabling smoother implementation of custom functionality, Medusa reduced the time to market for new features by 30%. Especially the ability to rapidly build custom logic was something Rigby found unique about the Medusa framework.

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We looked into other solutions, but I do not think it would have been possible, even at the slightest part, with any of the existing open-source or SaaS solutions to get the same result.

Jakub Zbąski

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Co-founder and CEO at Rigby

Custom functionalities and multi-access

When setting up the marketplace, Rigby aimed for simplicity in their stack using only a few external services. They used Strapi to manage content data such as homepage images, text, and About pages. Sendgrid and Mailchimp were used for marketing, Sentry for application monitoring, and OpenReplay for user session recordings.

The marketplace encompasses three user types: customers, vendors, and Patyna Admin. For vendors and Patyna Admin, Rigby created separate admin dashboards with unique access levels and control features.

Patyna Admin: Controlling the marketplace

Patyna’s admin has a custom dashboard from where they can control the entire marketplace. They can view all products, orders, vendors, and customers across the platform. Additionally, it allowed the team to:

• Create sales reports: This allows Patyna to generate PDF reports with sales and margin overviews across all products and vendors.
• Manage product attributes: This enables Patyna to define both standard product attributes (e.g., date of production) and custom attributes per product category (e.g., "Types of legs" for sofas). These attributes are then filterable for customers on the marketplace and must be filled out by vendors when creating new products within a category.
• Control discounts and gift cards: This allows them to create special customer discount codes or gift cards that can be used across all vendors.

Vendors: Controlling their store operations

Vendors are limited to controlling and accessing orders, customers, and products related to their own stores. Additionally, Rigby built custom functionality for:

• Self-pickup delivery: This feature allows vendors to offer pickup options for their products, and they can then manually mark orders as collected in their admin dashboard upon customer pick-up.
• Custom order splitting: When customers purchase products from multiple vendors, the order is split under the hood, ensuring each vendor manages only their part while the customer sees it all as a single order.
• 'Classics' products: Patyna has a unique section in their marketplace called 'Classics' for select iconic products. Vendors can propose products for this section directly in their admin dashboard, and the Patyna Admin then gets a chance to review the submissions afterward and approve them within their dashboard.

Being able to ship custom features faster has paid off. Patyna quickly saw a resurgence in vendor activity on the platform, and some vendors even expressed their satisfaction with the platform's improved usability, noting that they were now inclined to add more products to the new platform because of its improved usability and performance.

Cutting maintenance and debugging time in half

For Rigby, the case demonstrated the profound impact the Medusa framework could have on their development velocity. Patyna's team estimated that Medusa roughly halved the time spent on ongoing maintenance and debugging. The framework made it easier for the team to keep logs for debugging purposes while offering an overall better developer experience when implementing custom logic and functionality.

Despite using various composable ecommerce frameworks in the past, Rigby's learnings from Patyna convinced them to commit to Medusa for the future. Today, Rigby is included in Medusa's Expert list and has chosen Medusa as their framework for multiple other ecommerce cases. For them, the decisive factors for doubling down on Medusa were the developer experience and scalability.

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The whole developer experience was really awesome. From managing vast product listings to handling intricate vendor details, Medusa provided a robust and scalable solution.

Jakub Zbąski

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Co-founder and CEO at Rigby