Leeuwerik sets the bar high when it comes to customer service. In addition to their highly customised price deals, their customers enjoy super-fast delivery. Whenever a retailer, contractor, or carpenter places an order, everyone in the company rolls up their sleeves to deliver it neatly to its destination within 24 hours. A unique promise within the sector, which the company fulfils thanks to its enthusiastic teams and its own transport department.

Leeuwerik realises that this personal customer service should go hand in hand with an efficient online order system. To that end, the company built their own webshop, but it was dated. It was high time to develop a new webshop. A webshop with the capacity to integrate every single customer and their specific price deals in a scalable way, that could flexibly integrate marketing automation or other services and that would be easy to manage.

To determine the requirements and priorities for the webshop and its e-commerce platform we started a thorough exploration trajectory, involving all Leeuwerik stakeholders. The content managers, marketers, salespeople, and the IT team that would connect the back-office systems and microservices to the webshop … everyone had a wish list. How do you align all these different people and wishes? As their expert partner, we helped Leeuwerik to look at the requirements from the user perspective and make the right choices to deliver excellent online customer experience.

Mischa Braam, team lead at iO: “It is a must to involve everyone from the start, especially when working on a complex e-commerce platform. Through the weekly, plenary stand-ups, Leeuwerik knew exactly where it could pick up or build on a sprint or a feature and everyone supported the project from the start.”

It soon became clear that Leeuwerik had an extensive customer portfolio and a very wide product range. A large number of different price categories in the ERP had to be linked in a scalable way to online order forms. On top of that, these forms needed to be tailored to the customer's order profile.

The team faced a serious challenge: where to start? Due to the multitude of prices and the complexity of the linked customer data, we knew that the standard shared catalogue feature of Adobe Commerce would not be the best solution for this. In order for the webshop to be fast, manageable, and user-friendly and for it to compete with other online players, we had to develop stricter pricing structures. This enabled us to develop customised shared catalogues and easily link all the price deals in the ERP to the correct online customer account. This way, from login, customers automatically get the price deals they negotiated with the Leeuwerik sales team. In addition, the e-commerce platform can be scaled to accommodate new customers, products, or product groups.

We delivered an attractive, scalable, and competitive webshop. The most important Leeuwerik accounts were very positive about it. They can count on the best online and offline service from now on: a fast and efficient online order service and valuable, personal contact with their regular account manager.

This result was certainly due to the close cooperation. Mischa Braam: “We all feel we are part of the same team sharing a single goal: creating a super webshop. Today, when Leeuwerik organises a team day, they also invite the iO team. The fact that the team works so well together can only add to the success of upcoming projects.”