Anatoliy Dankov
CTO
Leroy Merlin Ukraine launched its online presence in 2011 and had a fully operational e-commerce function by 2012. Product data travelled from the company's ERP into a PIM for enrichment, and from there to the ecommerce website.
That architecture held for years. Once the catalog passed 40,000 SKUs, it became expensive to maintain: the PIM no longer received vendor support, manual work kept growing, and product data was harder to keep under control.
The company had to rebuild the centre of that data flow without pausing eCommerce.
The Legacy PIM Limited Further Ecommerce Development
The PIM had reached the end of its supported life, and the catalog interface was only one of the dependencies. The same system carried:
That concentration showed up in daily work:
The pace of the wider ecommerce platform had become tied to the limits of a system nobody could extend.
Manual Product Data Management Slowed Time to Market
A DIY catalog carries detailed technical information. Depending on the category, a product may require dimensions, materials, compatibility details, installation data, safety information, or dozens of category-specific attributes.
Much of that information was prepared by hand. Content specialists had to:
Across 40,000+ SKUs, those repeated actions accumulated:
Catalog rules also lived in the team's practical knowledge. An experienced specialist knew how a particular value should be interpreted, and the system rarely captured that decision.
Hiring more specialists would have added short-term capacity to a workload that kept growing with the catalog.
Offline-First Workflows Reduced Ecommerce Visibility
Order processing still followed the offline retail model. Online and offline orders travelled the same route, which left the ecommerce team without dedicated SLAs or a way to prioritize online fulfillment.
Order analytics gave limited operational detail. The team could not easily see:
Individual cases were solvable, and the underlying pattern stayed invisible.
Any replacement architecture had to cover four connected areas: product data management, catalog publishing, order visibility, and the continuity of a live ecommerce operation.
The project replaced the outdated product information applications with a centralized architecture that could operate independently of the former software vendor.
Scope included PIM, DAM, a tailored CMS, product publishing services, OMS, adjustments to the existing ecommerce website, and development of a new one.
HootCore PIM became the controlled environment for customer-facing product information. Attributes, categories, relationships, descriptions, and channel requirements are managed there before anything reaches publication.
The ERP kept its role as the source of core business data. Each system now has a clearer responsibility: ERP maintains operational records, and HootCore prepares those records for customer-facing commerce.
Product information does not operate in isolation, and the solution extended beyond PIM. Digital assets stay connected to product records, website content has its own management workflow, product data reaches publishing services, and orders are tracked through fulfillment.
The architecture connects:
Each component has a defined role, and the eСommerce flow between them stays connected.
The new PIM includes a Rule Engine that moved repeated catalog decisions out of employee memory and into maintainable system logic. More than 1,500 rules cover attribute transformations, calculated values, categorization, validation, and channel-specific interpretation.
Human judgment stays in the process. What changed is that specialists no longer repeat decisions the system can apply consistently across thousands of products.
The central workflow runs from ERP to HootCore PIM, through validation and transformation, and on to the website and ecommerce channels.
The substance of the change sits in what happens inside the PIM before a product becomes publishable.
ERP data gives a product its operational foundation, and it is rarely enough for a customer-facing product page. A record can hold an article number, price, tax information, and inventory fields while still missing the structured attributes customers use to compare and choose.
HootCore checks product data as it enters the PIM, rather than after a problem becomes visible on the live website. That moved the operating model from downstream correction to upstream control.
Source data often arrives in formats that do not match the internal catalog model. The Rule Engine makes those transformations repeatable across the catalog:
When the defined conditions are met, HootCore applies the same catalog decision every time, instead of asking a specialist to recreate it for each SKU.
Some fields never required manual entry, because they could be calculated from information already in the record. Moving those formulas into the PIM removed repeated work, made every result reproducible, and kept catalog logic transparent to the organization rather than to one employee.
A website, a mobile experience, a marketplace, or an internal workflow can each require different field names, formats, attribute sets, or presentation rules for the same source value.
HootCore handles channel-specific interpretation without a separate master record for every destination. Core product data stays centralized, and publishing logic prepares it for each required context.
That distinction matters in omnichannel retail. Centralization gives a retailer control over product information, not an obligation to display it identically everywhere.
Replacing a PIM inside an established ecommerce operation carries different risk from implementing one in a new business. The system being removed already carried:
Continuity was therefore part of the technical solution.
Testing the New Ecommerce Architecture
A test environment reproduced the production setup, which allowed the new PIM, its integrations, catalog behavior, and the publishing workflow to be verified before the final transition.
Problems surfaced there instead of on the live website, and internal users had time to learn the new workflow before it became their primary operating system.
Migrating the Product Catalog in Stages
Launch was never treated as one irreversible switch. The new PIM and its integrations were tested first, and adjustments to the legacy website kept ecommerce running throughout the transition.
Once the core product data flow had been verified, the new website was integrated with the PIM. Staged migration lowered technical risk and spared every internal team from changing every process at the same moment.
Preserving Product URLs and Organic Visibility
Existing URLs were part of the migration scope. Years of search visibility, external links, and customer access patterns were attached to those addresses.
Dropping them would have turned a technically successful migration into a commercial setback. URL continuity protected the organic value the ecommerce website had already accumulated.
The new architecture improved the speed of product data work and weakened the link between catalog growth and manual effort.
The operational outcome is broader than any single number:
The project also connected product management with the wider ecommerce stack. According to the verified client review, the new OMS, Zendesk integration, and order-picking system accelerated order processing, reduced errors, and improved visibility across the full order flow.
Those results belong to the whole model: product data, publishing, website, and order operations improved together, not PIM alone.
"The team ensured a smooth transition from the old PIM to the new one. We added functionality without disrupting operations."
The verified Clutch review also highlights the team's technical expertise, transparency, responsiveness, and ability to connect product information with the broader ecommerce and order-management environment.
Leroy Merlin Ukraine chose HootCore because it filled the gap between their ERP and their sales channels without replacing the systems already running the business:
Leroy Merlin Ukraine's experience shows what happens when catalog growth outpaces the architecture supporting it. The legacy PIM had served the business for years, and it could no longer provide the control, automation, and development path a large ecommerce operation required.
HootCore introduced a more structured model. ERP remained the operational source, PIM became the controlled product data layer, rules automated repeatable catalog decisions, and connected services prepared information for publication and order processing.
The outcome was a more scalable way to move a product from an internal record to a sellable ecommerce experience.
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