Case Study: B2B / B2C eCommerce Implementation for More Than Two Million Products

Ludwig Meister is a renowned German distributor for bearings, power transmission, fluid power and tooling products, selling online mainly to B2B customers. The company is one of the leading trade and service firms in Europe within the field of power transmission and is a tools and hydraulics specialist. It offers a comprehensive service for technical buyers in the operative as well as in the strategic area for resellers, maintenance engineers, and design engineers. The Ludwig Meister online shop as the front end is an additional service it provides clients with.

Business Needs

Ludwig Meister has 15.000 active B2B clients with 50.000 contact persons, resulting in a €100 million turnover per annum. A key challenge for the company was to connect its systems (ERP, eProcurement…) with the webshop to provide easy, seamless access to a wide variety of articles (over 2.5 Mio SKUs). The client also wanted to implement personalized offerings for individuals, tailor-made pricing per customer, and customer-related assortments backed by strong search function (Elasticsearch).

Pimcore Solution

Pimcore Gold partner Weblizards GmbH engaged with Ludwig Meister to build the required platform for products and services with the simplest and most flexible integration options. Pimcore platform was chosen mainly for its tremendous flexibility, open source structure, great website features, and capability to handle that many articles along with the website and webshop within one system.

The client took advantage of Pimcore Platform’s large number of out-of-the-box features and integration opportunities, which allowed for fast and lean launch and engaging user experiences. The Pimcore Platform handles product and article data, as well as media files, customer data, pricing, and order data.

The ERP provides up-to-date live-pricing structures per customer, detailed customer data, and all relevant article data to Pimcore (webshop). The webshop sends orders and offers data to ERP and is integrated with Payment Provider, Customer Systems (ERP and e-Procurement), Mail-Provider, and some less essential providers.

Order: Easy & fast online

With the quick search and the filter options, items are found in no time. You can also find your own article numbers stored in the ERP system via the search function.

Manage orders

The order management provides an overview of the previous and open orders. No matter which way you ordered - whether webshop, telephone, fax or EDI - under "Manage orders", all orders and their status can be viewed online. Recurring spare parts requirement is ordered again with just a few clicks.

Individual order data

You can enter your order and article numbers in the shopping cart as well as add useful notes. The individual numbers can be found on all order documents and the order overview in the webshop. This ensures rapid goods receipt and invoice verification and easy allocation to internal cost centers and projects.

"Extensive, variable display options for our products, quick adaptability to current offers, clear, comprehensible structure make the webshop a popular and positively evaluated tool for our customers."

- Max Meister, CEO Ludwig Meister

Business Results

The customer integration (OCI and cXML punchout) is managed via a self-service tool and can be handled by Ludwig Meister's customers themselves. Where other competitors need weeks or months to integrate their webshop into customer systems, Ludwig Meister self-developed tools enable that to be done within minutes – just with a few clicks and copy and paste efforts.

The company has been honored with the Digital Innovator Award 2019 by the Modern Distribution Management (MDM), Lafayette, USA.