Dolya Solar Energy — Empowering Ukraine’s Future with Clean Energy

We led the full project end-to-end over 4 months — from discovery in July 2024 to launch in November 2024. Dolya Solar's internal team handled brand direction and content strategy; our team executed the entire technical build.

Phase 1 — Discovery, Brand & Catalog Architecture (July 2024)

For a greenfield build, Phase 1 looks different from a migration. There's no legacy schema to map — but every architectural decision has to be made from scratch, with no precedent to lean on.

Key decisions resolved in this phase:

• Single Magento installation, trilingual storefront — one store, three languages (Ukrainian, Russian, English), hreflang for cross-language SEO

• Catalog architecture across 4 verticals — solar panels, inverters, EV chargers, batteries — each with its own attribute set, technical specs, and buyer-journey design

• Product taxonomy — brand, wattage, voltage, capacity, compatibility, use-case (home, business, off-grid), so buyers could filter by what actually matters to them

• Vendor & partnership architecture — Dolya Solar is a strategic partner of Deye (one of the leading global solar inverter manufacturers), plus other vendor partnerships across the renewable energy supply chain

• Dual buyer flow architecture — direct product purchase AND consultation lead capture, designed as parallel paths rather than competing CTAs

• B2B portal planned — architecture prepared for a B2B segment in the next phase (in the same way we'd built Dolya UA's B2B customer portal)

Phase 2 — Magento 2.4.7 Build & Frontend (August — September 2024)

The build went onto Hetzner Cloud VPS — the same hosting profile we use for Dolya UA, chosen for cost-performance and European data residency.

Core technical decisions:

• Magento 2.4.7 — current stable release, full PHP 8.x compatibility, supported through Adobe's lifecycle

• Custom Luma-based theme — full custom frontend development on Luma's component foundation, designed for both product browsing and high-consideration consultation journeys

• ElasticSearch for catalog search and faceted filtering across the 2,000 SKUs with vendor, wattage, capacity, and compatibility attributes

• PHP 8.x, MariaDB, Redis, Varnish standard production stack

The frontend wasn't just product pages and a checkout. It was designed around the real renewable energy buyer journey:

• Category landing pages for each vertical with educational content + product grids

• Product pages with full technical specifications (wattage, voltage, capacity, MPPT support, Deye compatibility, mounting type)

• Use-case content modules — "for home" vs "for business" routing

• Consultation CTA blocks placed alongside product browsing, not buried in a contact page

Phase 3 — Custom SES Calculator, CRM & Lead Pipeline (October 2024)

This was the phase that turned the build from "another Magento store" into "the Dolya Solar platform." Most of the differentiating engineering work happened here.

Custom Solar Energy System (SES) calculator. We built a real solar ROI configurator — not a contact form pretending to be a calculator. Buyers enter five parameters and get real-time output:

• Roof type — pitched roof, flat roof, or ground-mounted

• Available area — square meters

• System power — kW capacity

• Panel orientation — South, West, or East

• Electricity tariff — UAH per kWh

The calculator outputs:

• Annual energy generation in kWh (e.g., 35,430 kWh/year for a 30 kW south-facing system)

• Annual cost savings in UAH (e.g., ₴283,440/year at ₴8/kWh)

• Monthly breakdown chart — bar chart showing month-by-month generation and savings across all 12 months, with values displayed (January: 1,063 kWh / ₴8,503 → May: 4,960 kWh / ₴39,682)

Every completed calculation routes to a "Замовити розрахунок" (Order Calculation) CTA — turning a research session into a CRM lead with the calculation parameters attached. Sales gets contextual leads, not anonymous form submissions.

CRM integration — the same Master CRM platform we'd integrated for Dolya UA, configured here for the lead-routing model that Dolya Solar's consultation business depends on:

• Lead capture from contact forms, calculator submissions, and consultation requests

• Lead context preserved (calculator parameters, product interest, page source)

• Sales team works leads in CRM, not in Magento admin

Customer accounts (B2C) — standard Magento accounts with order tracking and customer portal for product purchases.

Payment & delivery:

• Bank transfer as primary payment method (large-ticket renewable energy purchases routinely require formal proforma billing rather than card payments)

• Nova Poshta integration for parcel delivery

• Pickup option for buyers collecting equipment directly

SEO setup from day one:

• Trilingual content (UA + RU + EN) with hreflang signals across all three languages

• Category-level optimization for renewable energy keywords ("сонячна станція", "інвертор", "EV зарядна станція", "система зберігання енергії", "сонячні панелі купити")

• Use-case content blocks targeting long-tail keywords ("сонячна станція для дому", "СЕС для бізнесу")

• Schema.org markup — Product, Organization, FAQPage (for the high-volume FAQ content typical in renewable energy)

• Regenerated multilingual sitemap

• Strategic internal linking between calculator → product pages → consultation CTA

Phase 4 — Launch & Ongoing (November 2024 — Present)

Dolya Solar launched in November 2024. Post-launch work continues — feature refinements, content additions for the SEO program, and the ongoing optimization that any new eCommerce platform needs in its first year of real-world traffic.

On the roadmap:

• B2B portal — same architecture pattern as Dolya UA's B2B portal, planned for the segment of installers, contractors, and resellers buying at volume

• Hyvä Theme migration — scheduled after the Dolya UA Hyvä migration completes, to bring Dolya Solar onto the same modern frontend stack and unlock further Core Web Vitals improvements

This is a partnership built to grow — and the architectural decisions in Phase 1 are what make those next phases additive rather than rebuilds.