Case Study: Bayer 04 Leverkusen Brings Its E-Commerce Shop up to a New Level

The Bundesliga club Bayer 04 Leverkusen has teamed up with team neusta, the full-service internet agency, to bring its e-commerce shop up to a new level by putting greater focus on the fan (user centricity) and paying more attention to performance, availability and cross-channel-commerce.

Business Needs

The Bundesliga club wanted to exchange its existing e-commerce solutions for the sales of merchandising, football boots and subscriptions for a new, centralized e-commerce system. Attention was placed on topics such as better customer targeting, performance stability and the possibility of cross-channel-commerce. Especially for campaigns at the start of each football season, it is imperative that various departments from IT to editing and inventory control can work together efficiently. With the new, uniform solution, Bayer 04 Leverkusen is now also a top player in the digital world.

Pimcore Solutions

„The introduction of Pimcore was made easy due to the clear and intuitive user interface. We can now flexibly and quickly play out high-quality content to our fans.“

Britta Backhaus, E-Commerce Manager, Bayer 04 Leverkusen Fußball GmbH

The Pimcore-Gold-Partner team neusta was challenged to realize Bayer 04 Leverkusen’s goals and to develop the new one-stop-shop e-commerce solution for the Leverkusen fans. Pimcore’s open source platform offers a wide variety of on-demand standard functionalities that match most of the required technical and editorial requirements. Another distinctive feature is the easy way with which the new digital solution can be expanded to incorporate future, individual customer requirements. Fabian Gutsche, the neusta managing director, enthuses: “PIMCORE gives us countless ways to develop tailormade online solutions as requested by our customers.”

Business Results

After roughly 1.5 years of conceptual design and technical development Bayer 04 Leverkusen was ready for the Go Live of its new shop. In the beginning, fans were able to order from the categories merchandising, gift vouchers, football boots and memberships via the fast modern and responsive new platform. The new system also passed the performance test: despite unusually high traffic after the publishing of a special jersey for the 40th anniversary of the Bundesliga, the shop remained stable and proved its new strength. Many fans were able to secure their limited jersey via the new shop and the campaign was a huge success.

Currently, Bayer 04 Leverkusen and team neusta are working on further improvements of the platform. A continuous-deployment-process is supposed to simplify the development workflow and to accelerate future optimizations of the e-commerce-application. In addition, usability tests are in progress to further improve the UX and the overall shopping experience for the fans.