Case Study: Ecommerce Solution for Norway’s Largest Apple Retailer

Eplehuset is the largest retailer of Apple products in Norway, with 22 stores and a strong web presence.

Summary

In less than a year Eplehuset created a brand new e-commerce experience from scratch using Magento 2 and Pimcore as the foundation. For a company of this scale, servicing both the B2C and B2B markets, an e-commerce project is likely to have complex requirements.

The project involved numerous integrations, including an extensive real-time integration with their SAP-based ERP system. Custom functionality included advanced tools for B2B, complex price lists, solutions for student and teacher discounts, advanced and individual product configuration, courses and much more. Pimcore played a central role in the implementation of the online platform, as both a PIM, DAM and CMS.

Through a very tight integration with Magento, Pimcore completely controls the look and feel of the Magento-based store front. From content pages to custom product pages, everything can be tailored in Pimcore. The products carried by Eplehuset have complex data models due to many co-dependant variations of components when configuring products, and because of variations and restrictions from customer to customer. Pimcore really excels as a product information management system in situations like these, offering Eplehuset easy to use tools for maintaining, configuring and enriching their catalog.

Convert has been the single responsible e-commerce partner for the entire project, from the planning process, design, technical implementation and subsequent hosting and management of the delivered platform.

Business Needs

„I especially appreciate the overview gained from the list views, offering control of batch changes, visibility and status of our product catalog. “

Halvor Schmidt, eCommerce Manager

Eplehuset have had an online presence for a long time. The existing platform however was outdated, and did not offer the expected customer experience, or the flexibility and development pace required to keep up with a market in rapid change.

An outdated platform with a lacking customer experience meant that Eplehuset was missing out in a market where online sales is steadily growing, and customers are becoming very accustomed to shopping online rather than in traditional retail stores.

Required Capabilities included:

Tight ERP integration
Rich content management
Complex product data and configuration
Advanced B2B tools, including individual price books, custom assortment and configurations, employee shopping etc
Omnichannel functionality

Pimcore Solution

Pimcore partner Convert created a solution based on Magento 2 as the storefront, but with most of the heavy lifting being performed in SAP and Pimcore. The SAP-based ERP system is the master of base product data, customer information and order management. Data is transferred to in real-time through an integration hub to Pimcore and Magento.

In Pimcore product data is maintained and enriched, allowing for complex product data structures that can be used both in content and product related functionality like filtering, search and product configuration. Changes to product data or content in Pimcore is immediately propagated to the storefront using a real-time queue based integration.

The changes are cascading, allowing changes to product data to also trigger updates for content making use of the product data, ensuring always up-to-date content and data across the site.

The new platform offers Eplehuset customers a better responsive online shopping experience across devices, and allows for continued development at a faster pace than before. With the new platform in place Eplehuset is in a much better position to tackle a shift from traditional to online retail.