Case Study Salling Group The company With more than 1,600 shops, Salling Group is the biggest retailer in Denmark. They’re stores include household Salling Group chain brands such as fotex, Bilka, Netto, Salling and Wupti, as well as Starbucks and Carl’s Jr. franchises in Denmark, and more than 1,400 stores and web shops in Founded: 1906 Poland and Germany. Headquarters: Brabrand, Denmark The challenge Salling Group began to realize they needed to Industry: Retail strengthen their omnichannel experience, which Revenue: 9 billon USD required technology that would serve their customers across all digital channels. Furthermore, it was clear that Employees: 50,000 their existing SAP Hybris setup was not scalable in terms of cost efficiency and recruiting talent. Partner: In-house The solution Salling Group implemented a new tech stack with commercetools’ headless commerce architecture at its core, and based on modern UX designs with a mobile- first mindset. Headless CMS (Magnolia), microservices, APIs and Jamstack to replace the monolithic platform. The result The solution brought time-to-market for their new web shops down to a two-month lead time and lowered eCommerce costs by 75%. It also enabled each brand to customize their online shop and content, while still working under the same technology. Additionally, release cycles increased from once every other week to multiple times per day. Salling Group refreshes its eCommerce Breaking free from the monolith In 2013, when Salling Group made the decision to re-platform their digital stores, they went with the obvious choice at the time: SAP Hybris. But seven years is a long time in an industry that seemingly has daily breakthroughs, and what appears shiny and new at the beginning can become cumbersome and outdated in no time at all. As the biggest retail chain in Denmark with many different brands under their wing, it was imperative for Salling Group to be scalable and cost-efficient, and their old monolithic platform could not keep up. They had the option to either “We strive for a simple and modern upgrade or re-platform completely, but the omnichannel shopping experience, built on previous web shop installations cost too much headless principles and microservices, which in licenses and maintenance. The previous web enables us to anticipate future developments.” shop installations cost too much in licenses and – Ismael García, Digital Technology Chief, maintenance. And with excessive customizations, Salling Group it was difficult to find the specialized developers required to run it. In addition to these goals, Salling Group also So Salling Group turned to their fellow Danes for wanted to lower their overall eCommerce costs, advice. They asked LEGO and Bang & Olufsen, which were too high due to licensing, build and who they regularly exchange learnings with, about operating fees. They aspired to get rid of anything their commerce architectures, and that’s what first monolith-related to enable faster rollout of brought Salling Group to commercetools. new functionalities, and finally, they sought to consolidate all their eCommerce sites into one joint commerce architecture. Matching the goals to the solution Outside the digital world and in their offices, Salling Group hoped to attract top IT talent by To implement the perfect commerce stack, Salling removing technology from their old monolithic Group visualized their IT and business objectives. platform – which required specially skilled In simple terms, they knew they needed a tech developers that were hard to find and expensive stack where new websites could operate with to constantly train for each new release and individual UIs on top of the same commerce update. By upgrading to a language-agnostic engine. Salling Group also desired a stronger platform, Salling Group can now bring on all omnichannel customer journey to better serve types of IT masterminds, ensuring the commerce their digital patrons by introducing new headless, platform is always at peak performance. microservice-based technology. Unleashing modern The results speak for commerce themselves To actualize their vision of a modern commerce Although commercetools is a small part of the platform, the first technical decision that was overall architecture, we’ve had a big impact on made was to go headless. And to Salling Group, Salling Group’s websites. To start, their web commercetools, (as recommended by their friends shops are operating much faster. Their baskets, over at LEGO and Bang & Olufsen) offered a quick which commercetools support, have a response and easy entrance to the software required. time of an astounding 140 milliseconds. Data is Furthermore, it became clear that commercetools now consolidated on one platform that provides would be far more affordable to run with better consistent pricing, product information and results. discounts across all channels. With commercetools in the backend, Salling “We worked with commercetools to implement Group could take advantage of the composable a microservice-based, headless commerce commerce approach, selecting best-in-breed architecture, which made our release cycles go vendors that are the best at what they do. For the from once every other week to multiple times CMS, they went with another headless solution, per day.” Magnolia, due to their high market reputation. – Tina Lykke Kristensen, Senior Manager Non- Rounding out the rest of the commerce package Food eCommerce, Salling Group is: ERP: SAP There were unexpected benefits that came from PIM: Stibo implementing commercetools as well. With the CMS: Magnolia 2020 global pandemic throwing a curveball that Frontend: Vue.js no one saw coming, Salling Group saw more POS: Viking customers being driven to shop or reserve their Search: Solr orders online. With commercetools, Salling Group was able to seamlessly scale to higher traffic Their new tech stack is based on modern UX, volumes, supporting the 150% growth of their headless technology, microservices and APIs, Click & Collect service and 30% increase in online with Jamstack replacing the existing monolith. traffic without adding any extra digital operational Furthermore, Salling Group has recognized that costs. traffic from mobile devices is increasing and accounts for more than 60% of total traffic to all Speaking of cutting costs, Salling Group’s previous of their websites, so all UX designs are made with costs were cut dramatically by 75% thanks a mobile-first mindset for a seamless experience to lower operational costs in general and the across their digital channels. consolidation of their web shops to one platform. And the benefits keep coming: They’ve improved UX, strengthened the omnichannel presence of their individual brands, and they’re having an easier time recruiting for the development team. Basically, all of the goals they set out to achieve with their new commerce solution have been met. What’s in the pipeline And though Salling Group initially planned to use commercetools for pricings and orders, In accordance with Salling Group’s plans, Bilka they’ve come to know that we can offer so much (DK) was the first online shop to go online, with more. In the future, Salling Group plans to use Netto (ApS & Co. KG), føtex (DK) and Salling soon commercetools for the custom-built apps they’re following. Although the initial implementation planning to develop, like Click & Collect, which will of Salling Group’s new tech stack deployment add even more customization to their web shops took over a year, it became so much easier after and digital touch points to their stores. that. Once everything was up and running, they deployed four web shops in only four months. As demonstrated by Salling Group’s success, once By virtue of commercetools facilitating highly you have commercetools in your backend, you customizable shopping experiences, each web open the door to endless commerce possibilities. shop is completely tailored to Salling Group’s different brands. What is especially noteworthy is how Salling Group’s commerce platform goes beyond their individual brands to offer an outstanding solution for the company as a whole. With its flexibility and scalability, it can be replicated for any new acquisitions or projects, as well as expanded with new functionalities (new touchpoints, channels or countries) at a much faster and easier rate because of commercetools’ microservice-, cloud- based technology. About commercetools commercetools is the world’s leading platform for next-generation B2C and B2B commerce. To break the market out of being restrained by legacy suites, commercetools invented a headless, API-first, multi-tenant SaaS commerce platform that is cloud-native and uses flexible microservices. Using modern development building blocks in a true cloud platform provided by commercetools, customers can deliver the best commerce experiences across every touchpoint on a large scale. commercetools has offices across the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific, with headquarters in Germany. Since its founding in 2006, commercetools software has been implemented by Fortune 500 companies across industries, from retail to manufacturing and from telecommunications to fashion. www.commercetools.com Munich - Berlin - Jena - Amsterdam - London - Durham NC - Melbourne - Singapore.