Expreso Polar
449 paid orders in its first holiday quarter — and, since May 2026, one back office running thousands of orders a month across both sales channels.
Their own-brand channel was being switched off
Expreso Polar sells on MercadoLibre, and sold under its own brand through Mercado Shops. Mercado Libre set 31 December 2025 as the date Mercado Shops would stop operating, stopped allowing new stores well before it, and offered a simplified catalogue — Mi Página — in its place rather than a storefront. More than 40,000 active shops were on the same deadline.
For Expreso Polar the date landed on the wrong side of the calendar. Their main lines are Christmas trees and decorations: the year is won or lost between October and December, and the shutdown fell days after that quarter closed. Meeting the deadline on its own terms meant running the most important season of the year on a platform with an expiry date, or migrating in the middle of it.
And the channel at stake was the one where being the manufacturer means anything. Expreso Polar makes its own Christmas trees and imports the rest, selling retail and wholesale for over fifteen years — “direct from the factory” is their argument, and on someone else’s marketplace it is invisible.
They also could not afford to start from zero. A brand-new store has no reviews, no ratings, no history — while their MercadoLibre listings had thousands of opinions attached to them. Owning the channel would have meant giving up the trust that made people buy.
A platform they own, live ahead of the shutdown
They went live in September, not in December. We built their store on Sylius 2.0 and put it in production three months ahead of the shutdown, so the season ran on the platform they own and the shutdown itself was a non-event. Sylius was the right base for a reason specific to this business: the catalogue spans Christmas, toys, artificial plants, leather goods, home and stationery, with promotions that change by payment method and by bank — behaviour that off-the-shelf storefronts model badly and Sylius models natively.
The trust came with them. MercadoLibre keeps three different ids for the same physical product, and the obvious one returns almost no reviews. We built a sync that resolves the seller’s catalogue listing and pulls the aggregate, so products arrived on the new store with the ratings they had already earned — today some carry over 1,400 opinions. A store of your own usually means starting at zero stars. This one did not.
Then one back office for both channels. In May 2026 we shipped the dispatch manager: orders from their own store and from MercadoLibre land in a single operation, with status reconciliation, webhooks, a dispatch schedule, automated shipping through Rapiboy and invoicing through Contabilium. Owning a storefront is the visible half of leaving a marketplace platform; being able to operate both channels without doubling the work is the half that decides whether it holds.
Own-brand storefront on Sylius 2.0
A multi-category catalogue across Christmas, toys, artificial plants, leather goods, home, stationery, tech and sports, with a CMS for their own content.
Unified order and dispatch manager
Their own store plus MercadoLibre in one back office, with status reconciliation, webhooks and a dispatch schedule.
MercadoLibre review sync
Resolves the catalogue listing behind each product and imports the seller’s aggregate rating, so a new store launches with proof instead of empty stars.
Faceted catalogue search on Elasticsearch
Trees filter by height across fifteen brackets from 20 cm to 3 m and by twelve colours, with live counts. A tree catalogue is unusable without it.
Argentine payments
MercadoPago, Modo and bank transfer, with instalments and transfer discounts shown in the storefront.
Automated shipping with Rapiboy
Shipments are created from the order and tracked back into it: the dispatch manager registers each one with the courier and reconciles its status, so nobody re-keys an address or chases a tracking code.
Invoicing with Contabilium
Every paid order is invoiced in their accounting system and the invoice id is written back onto the order, so commerce and billing stay in one ledger without manual entry.
Feeds, tracking and email
Google Merchant, Meta CAPI, their own analytics layer, back-in-stock notifications and Brevo email.
Admin security
Two-factor authentication (TOTP, email, trusted device) and role-based permissions on top of our own open-source RBAC plugin.
Leaving a platform you do not own?
One season in, and the second one starting higher
The platform’s first holiday quarter — October to December 2025, its first ever — closed with 449 paid orders. That is the client’s own figure, published in their public Clutch review.
Because the business is seasonal, the honest way to read the rest is by season rather than by month: the off-season settles low by design, and what matters is how the next ramp starts. It is starting ahead — the platform is growing month over month into the 2026 season, and running above the equivalent point of the previous year’s ramp.
Behind both channels, the back office we built now moves thousands of orders a month.
We were very impressed by the professional approach to our needs, and the quality of the website they delivered.
Technology stack
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