One Shop Away From Home: An Expat Grocery Platform Built to Deliver
CLIENT — TABEYA
An online grocery store built for expats in the Netherlands craving a taste of home. We included country of origin browsing, real time checkout, dual delivery/pickup fulfillment, and a barcode lookup system that populates the catalog automatically.
Expats living in the Netherlands often cannot find the specific brands and products they grew up with in a regular Dutch supermarket. Tabeya set out to be that missing shelf. It needed a store built around where products come from, not just what category they are in. They needed a platform that could organize a catalog by country of origin, support both home delivery and in store pickup, and take real payments reliably, including iDEAL, the dominant payment method in the Netherlands. On top of that, populating the catalog by hand for thousands of imported SKUs was a bottleneck that threatened to slow the whole launch down.
We built Tabeya on top of CORE, our in house framework. This gave the project a proven foundation instead of scaffolding built from scratch. Products are organized around country of origin, letting expats shop by "home" rather than hunting through generic grocery categories.
To keep that catalog populated without a mountain of manual data entry, we built an automated barcode lookup pipeline. Scan or enter a product’s EAN code, and the system pulls in its image, name, and product details automatically.
We built cart, order, and customer flows tailored to grocery retail on top of CORE. Checkout was integrated with Stripe to support both card and iDEAL payments, complete with a dedicated confirmation flow for asynchronous payment methods. The platform supports two distinct fulfillment paths, delivery and pickup, each with its own order flow. A Google Shopping feed was also built to extend reach to expats searching for home country products outside the site itself.
Tabeya launched as a fully working expat grocery platform. Customers can browse by country of origin, use the cart, and choose delivery or pickup instead of looking at a static site. The barcode lookup pipeline turned catalog onboarding from a manual, per item chore into a near automatic process, letting the team populate and maintain a large, imported goods catalog without a data entry bottleneck. The Google Shopping feed opened a targeted acquisition channel for expats actively searching for home country products, and building on CORE meant the project shipped on a proven foundation rather than infrastructure built from zero.