- 170Mrevenue
- 20Mtotal visits
- 2Mannual orders
- 200Kunique visitors
PLUS's monolithic e-commerce platform started showing its limits as their e-commerce grew, affecting both revenue and innovation. As their trusted digital partner, we set out to develop a new e-commerce platform to improve stability, scalability and time-to-market. Together we made the bold choice to combine OutSystems, Commercetools and Contentful, the first time anyone had brought these leading systems together.
In recent years, more and more customers saw the benefits of home grocery delivery, offering consumers great convenience and comfort. To drive further digital growth, PLUS put the emphasis on its omnichannel offering. However, their e-commerce platform began showing its limits. As a monolithic platform, it couldn't handle rapid growth in demand, leading to serious performance issues that negatively affected e-commerce revenue. In 2021, PLUS decided it was time for a new e-commerce platform, one that would offer stability, better performance and a faster time-to-market. The retailer asked us to help choose and develop the front-end and back-end architecture that could fulfil their ambitions.
1 webshop became 6 projects
OutSystems had never been used as the heart of a composable e-commerce platform for hundreds of thousands of active customers. This called for a highly innovative approach in close collaboration with PLUS. Challenge accepted. Meanwhile, PLUS realised this was also a good moment to tackle the challenges in their data landscape. Using Intershop resulted in thirteen different data systems that Intershop updated once a day. Updating the online search results took another day, resulting in a painful two-day delay. Bringing data into scope significantly expanded the project, resulting in a programme covering six separate projects. These included the data infrastructure, a retail management portal, the CMS, the e-commerce engine and two separate front-ends.
“With the growth in the number of stores, and with it the number of pickup and delivery points, we expect increasing demand for omnichannel shopping from both existing and new PLUS customers. This new platform allows us to meet their future needs more precisely.”
Stephan Bosman
Head of Digital & eCommerce · PLUS Retail
“Product League helps solve our business problems. Product League is our strategic digital partner that accelerates our digital transformation and builds what we can't buy.”
Arvid Nieuwsma
Head of Product · PLUS Retail
Next-level commerce
The unique composable combination of OutSystems, Commercetools and Contentful lets PLUS create next-level shopping experiences that are accessible, convenient and distinctive. Together, the three solutions guarantee 99.99% uptime, resolving previous stability issues. Performance is guaranteed by automatic, data-driven scaling services. New features such as voice or barcode search were added within a single two-week sprint, something that previously would have taken at least two months. That flexibility delivers the fast time-to-market PLUS was looking for.
“The reason we chose a combination of headless and composable architecture has to do with the nature of our organisational needs. With more than 400 stores, largely run by entrepreneurs, we want to retain a lot of flexibility to meet customer needs at the micro-store level.”
Arvid Nieuwsma
Head of Product · PLUS Retail
The new webshop went live in February 2024. With annual growth in both market share and online revenue, PLUS can count on a fast ROI, since the shift from a monolithic to a composable architecture also affects total cost of ownership. For example, the cost of changing a product drops significantly when updates are no longer held back by irregular release cycles. The new architecture allows PLUS to keep growing its e-commerce revenue by improving the customer experience through fast innovation and value creation.
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