When Idé House of Brands contacted us and presented their situation and needs, we already knew that this project was going to be something quite unique in digital commerce.
It was all-consuming and challenging on so many different levels, so once we knew that this was a potential project that someone would have the opportunity to work on, we just had to give it our all.
The challenges
It would be too extensive to go through all the various aspects of this project in detail, but we would like to give you an insight into some of the main areas.
The products
Idé House of Brands has both a wide and deep product range which does not only have the typical variants such as for example color and size. The sells profile articles where the whole idea behind the product is marketing, thus the various products have a number of options in relation to customer-specific adaptations, such as the placement of logos.
International B2B stores
The company has traditionally had market-adapted websites with a presentation of the product range in the five different markets (NO, SE, DK, FI, IS) in which they are represented, a channel they have mainly used to attract potential customers.
During the preliminary project, we came to the conclusion that it would be beneficial not only to use these to attract potential customers, but also to open up direct sales from the SME market, which until now was served manually by salespeople.
With a successful B2B venture, the company can increase turnover in the SME market without the corresponding involvement of salespeople, who will still have time to focus on larger, more strategically important customers where the involvement of account managers is crucial.
170+ online stores
What makes this project unique is that the company not only serves the SME market directly via its own online stores, but actually offers customers its own online stores (e.g. Nordea store) that reflect their brand, with their product range, stock, prices and conditions specific to the specific customer.
So when an HR department, marketing department or other employees wants to purchase marketing material, they go to their own online store provided by Idé House of Brands.
Over the past 10 years, these online stores have grown to 170+ stores, and creating them over a ten-year period is one thing, but developing 170+ new stores in a project, migrating the old ones over to the new ones and both taking into account the development cost associated with new online stores going forward, as well as the maintenance of all of them, was truly a unique challenge.
The solution was to create these online stores based on Magento Open Source and develop an "ecommerce management tool" specifically for Idé House of Brands that enables sellers to set up a new online store themselves in just a few minutes, even with the customer's own adaptations such as logo, colors and product range.
The various online stores have their own installations so that customer data is kept separate from each other and the consequence of any downtime is reduced to a single store instead of all of them. It is also very scalable in contrast to having a central installation with 170+ online store views.
We can also use this "ecommerce management tool" solution to make the necessary updates across all the online stores that are operated in the same cluster in a more cost-effective way.
PIM, DAM and CMS
Idé House of Brands was already useing Pimcore PIM, DAM and CMS as a central hub for product enrichment, media and content publishing across their own B2B online stores and to allocate customer-specific products, content and media for each of the various 170+ online stores their various larger customers had.
They were very happy with Pimcore, so it would continue to be an important pillar of the new solution, but on a completely new installation.
Integrations
Idé House of Brands has, as one would expect from a significant, international B2B player, an extensive and complex system architecture with a number of unique requirements that include their Microsoft ERP and Punchout solutions.
Our role in the project
Eager to learn more?
Get in touch with Markus! He knows quite a bit about eCommerce - oh, and he's quite nice to talk with as well!
