The first checkout in bol.com's webshop was built in Java and JavaScript around 2005. As years went by and the company expanded into new market segments and services, what was state-of-the-art at the time became outdated and called for major renovation.
A decision was made to migrate to Kotlin and move from a monolith to a microservice architecture. The idea was to start with the e-books segment first and roll out the project to other customers step by step, starting in 2018.
The main requirement was for the system to be fully scalable and compatible with all the new features. After all, in the world of software things evolve so quickly that ten years may feel like a century.
As team members at bol.com we were obviously very excited to be involved in such an ambitious project with all the “shiny new things” in terms of technology at our disposal. At the same time we had to be able to work under high pressure and meet strict deadlines, which was a great challenge.
As new customer groups were being moved to the new functionality innovation was taking place on the go. Nonetheless we chose not to take any shortcuts whatsoever, which created rock solid foundations for the new system.
The result is a beautiful, swift one-page checkout with most of the information already filled-in based on previous choices. In addition to a great user experience, the new checkout makes innovation, experiments, analysis and testing straightforward and quick.
In hindsight, although the project took longer than originally expected, it was well worth it. In our opinion bol.com's checkout is currently the best one in the world, leaving the competition, even the likes of Amazon, way behind.
