Client and task

The Tea Workshop sells Chinese tea and teaware in Moscow and across Russia. Tea is sold both by weight and by the piece: the same pu-erh is bought as a 25-gram sample or as a whole cake. The shop needed a store that handles this, keeps stock in line with the warehouse and runs every sale through the website, online and offline.

What we built

• Grams and pieces in one product card

  One product offers “25 g”, “357 g cake”, “tong of 7 cakes”. Stock is kept in grams, and the number of available packs is calculated from it.

  Customers pick the pack they want, and the shop never sells more than it has.

• Category tree with virtual sections

  Collections such as “Collectible pu-erh” and sections by factory sit on top of the main tree; product properties (type, year, weight) are set in the admin panel.

  A new section or property appears without changing the site.

• Single accounting

  Orders and their statuses go to MoySklad, stock is reconciled with the accounting system. Offline sales also go through the website.

  Stock on the site matches the warehouse, with one ledger for online and offline.

• Payment to the shop's account

  By card on the shop's bank payment page, in instalments with Yandex Split, or by invoice for companies. Fiscal receipts go through a cloud cash register. If the bank delays its payment notification, the site checks the status with the bank itself.

  Money arrives directly, and a paid order never stays “unpaid”.

• Delivery across Russia

  CDEK with a pickup-point map, Yandex Delivery, Russian Post, courier in Moscow, in-store pickup. Free delivery above an order threshold applies automatically.

  Customers see delivery options and prices right away.

• Points and customer account

  Loyalty points, order history, favourites, a “Waiting for restock” list.

  Customers have a reason to come back: points build up with every purchase.

• Search that forgives typos

  “maofen” finds “Maofeng”, “da hong par” finds “Da Hong Pao”.

  Customers find the tea even if they don't know how the name is spelled.

• Marketplace

  The catalogue is exported as a feed to Yandex Market.

  One catalogue serves both the website and the marketplace.

How it works

The shop is built on Sylius, an open-source e-commerce platform on PHP and Symfony. The storefront is a separate Vue app that gets the catalogue, cart and orders through the shop's API. Background jobs run through a queue. An outage of an external system (warehouse, cash register, email) doesn't break checkout: the order is saved, and the administrator gets an email about the failure. Search engine crawlers receive ready-made HTML pages. The shop's mini app in Telegram and MAX runs on the same API — that's a separate case study.

Timeline and scale

1. August 2019 kick-off: shop and storefront from scratch.
2. 2019–2020 main development: catalogue, inventory, payment, delivery, marketplace.
3. 2021–2025 support.
4. 2026 a new round: payment reconciliation with the bank, receipts via a cloud cash register, typo-tolerant search, loyalty points and customer account, a faster storefront, a mini app in Telegram and MAX.

Scale: over 5,000 commits across the shop and the storefront.

What it gave the shop

• One ledger for online and offline

  Every sale goes through the website, stock matches the warehouse.

• Tea specifics built into the shop

  Grams and cakes in one product card, no workarounds or manual recounts.

• The shop grows without rewrites

  New payment and delivery methods plug into the same core, and the mini app was launched on the same API.

Technologies

• PHP
• Symfony
• Sylius
• Vue.js
• MySQL
• Beanstalkd
• Docker
• Yandex Cloud

Status

Live since 2019: teaworkshop.ru.