Bringing National based food wholesaler’s ecommerce experience to mobile

As part of our long-standing development partnership with a national based food wholesaler, we worked alongside their internal development and testing teams to build a new mobile ordering application for iOS and Android.

The aim was straightforward: give their customers the core ecommerce experience they already relied on, but in an application designed specifically for mobile.

Behind that simple objective was a considerably more complex engineering challenge. Wholesale food ordering involves much more than displaying products and taking payments. Customer-specific permissions, account rules, product availability and established ordering practices all needed to be reflected accurately in the app.

The result is a cross-platform mobile application built with Avalonia UI and .NET 10, integrated into their existing ecommerce ecosystem and designed around the way its customers actually order.

The challenge: turning an established ecommerce journey into a mobile experience

National based food wholesaler already had an established ecommerce platform, business processes and technology estate. The challenge was not to reinvent them, but to translate them into a mobile experience without losing the rules and functionality customers depended on.

At its core, the application needed to allow customers to:

• Sign in using their existing wholesale account
• Browse and search the product catalogue
• Create and manage product lists
• Add products to lists and baskets
• Review their basket and progress through checkout
• Pay securely and place orders for delivery
• Access support through integrated live chat

Those journeys sound familiar to anyone who has used an ecommerce application. The complexity sits underneath them.

Wholesale accounts can behave differently depending on the customer, their permissions and the commercial rules attached to their account. Products and ordering options can also be governed by existing business processes. We therefore needed to implement their extensive business rules and access controls without allowing that complexity to surface in the customer experience.

The objective throughout was to make something complicated feel simple.

The solution: cross-platform .NET with secure integrations

The application was built using Avalonia UI and .NET 10, providing a shared development approach across iOS and Android while still delivering applications for both native mobile platforms.

A detailed Figma design, produced by a design partner, provided the visual foundation. Our role was to turn those designs into working user journeys while accounting for real product data, account behaviour, validation, permissions and the many edge cases that emerge in a production ecommerce platform.

The application integrates with a number of services across their technology stack:

• Avalonia UI and .NET 10 provide the core cross-platform application architecture.
• Algolia sits behind the product experience, providing the product data required for browsing, searching and building orders.
• Elavon is integrated into the checkout journey to handle secure payments.
• Brevo provides live chat functionality, giving customers a direct support channel from within the application.
• Our Customers API layer connects the app with the wider ecommerce platform and the systems responsible for customer accounts, ordering and business logic.
• Cloudflare manages the API edge, with communication protected using mutual TLS (mTLS) to provide an additional layer of authentication and security between systems.

This separation was important. The mobile app could concentrate on delivering a fast, intuitive customer experience while established backend services remained responsible for the underlying data and processes.

Building around the business, not just the specification

A significant part of the project was understanding what needed to happen between the screens.

Rather than simply receiving a specification and implementing it in isolation, we worked directly with their developers, testers and wider project team to refine requirements and establish how journeys should behave.

That meant working through questions such as what a particular customer should be allowed to see, how different account permissions affect an order, how existing lists should behave on mobile and what happens when an established business rule intersects with a new user journey.

In many cases, the correct behaviour could only be established by bringing together technical knowledge and operational knowledge.

Close collaboration with their testing team was particularly valuable. Features could be tested against real-world scenarios and existing business rules throughout development, allowing edge cases and requirement gaps to be identified early rather than becoming problems towards release.

The result was not simply a mobile interpretation of a website. It was an application built around the same processes, controls and expectations that underpin their wider ecommerce operation.

What this enables

For their customers, the app provides another convenient way to manage regular wholesale ordering from a device that is already in their pocket.

The best thing is it extends an existing digital platform without creating an isolated new system. Product information continues to flow through Algolia, payments are handled through Elavon, customer and ordering functionality remains connected to existing services, and security is maintained through the protected API architecture.

From a development perspective, the use of .NET and Avalonia UI also provides a maintainable foundation across both mobile platforms, allowing functionality to evolve without maintaining two completely independent applications.

Just as importantly, the project reflects the benefit of an established development partnership. This was one of many projects we have delivered with National based food wholesaler, meaning our team could work within their existing technology, processes and development practices rather than approaching the application as a standalone build.

Conclusion

Building a mobile ordering application is relatively easy to describe. Building one that accurately reflects years of established wholesale processes, customer permissions, ecommerce rules and integrations is considerably more involved.

By working closely with National based food wholesaler, their developers, testing team and design partner, we were able to turn a detailed Figma design into a secure cross-platform application built around their existing digital estate.

Using Avalonia UI and .NET 10 alongside Algolia, Elavon, Brevo and a Cloudflare-managed API protected by mTLS, the application provides a modern mobile ordering experience without compromising the business logic behind it.

It is another step in our ongoing development partnership with National based food wholesaler: using the right technology, integrated with the systems they already rely on, to make complex processes simpler for the people using them.