composable commerce

A powerful new Composable Commerce B2B platform for retail giant Plaisio

After an intensive architecture, development, testing, and implementation phase, Plaisio's new B2B commerce platform is live. This 'business to business' platform enables the Greek retail giant to offer its extensive product range to business customers more efficiently and in a more targeted manner. While Plaisio may be less well-known in the Netherlands, it has been the market leader in consumer electronics, gaming, mobile devices, office supplies and computer accessories in Greece and Bulgaria for many years. With 50 million visitors annually and a catalogue that has now grown to 40,000 products, the company also serves a significant customer base.

The new B2B platform allows Plaisio to further expand its sales market and strengthen its market position. With this new platform, Plaisio currently guides approximately 100,000 customers from 50,000 different organizations through their catalogue. These are large numbers, and these business customers also have different needs than private customers. This makes a B2B platform a lot more complex.

The Complexity of B2B Commerce Requires a Focused Approach

A B2B platform is a lot more complex than a B2C platform. In addition to an optimal user experience, organizations also expect support for:

Multiple warehouses and inventory locations

Customer specific agreements

Orders in large volumes

Fast repeat orders via your own product lists

Insight into historical ordering behavior and spending per product category

These expectations place high demands on the design and performance of a new platform. That is why we have chosen a Composable architecture so that we can optimally respond to flexibility and scalability.

Customer-specific, Personalized and Efficient

The new platform offers both end users and Plaisio itself more control and insight. Business customers can easily create product lists and place repeat orders themselves, so that products that are needed a lot – such as office supplies – can easily be reordered. Based on order history, Plaisio can then make recommendations, so that customers can discover interesting new products. But the personalization goes further than just being able to customize the products: a customer support team is assigned per organization, so that direct personal contact can always be made.

Plaisio's persoonlijke support team staat altijd voor je klaar.

Your personal support team is ready to help you.

With a catalog of 40,000 products, it is essential to have a clear overview. That is why Plaisio can hide parts of the catalog from customers, who can see a breakdown of purchases per category in their purchase history, and can also create their own organization-specific catalog. This way, a customer always knows where their budget is going, and they do not waste time searching through products that are not relevant to them.

Alle B2B klanten hebben altijd inzicht in hun uitgaven door een handige analyse sectie.

You always have insight into your purchases.

Unique to Aviva: smart B2B price synchronization

For B2B sales, there is always a price negotiation per customer. This means that a different price can be set per product, per customer. Here the technical requirements become more complex: in order to be able to show all customers a personal price per product, we need to be able to calculate potentially 3.75 billion different prices. Since there are no existing SaaS solutions that can handle this volume, we have built a custom solution. This synchronizes all prices with Plaisio's back-office at lightning speed, and all prices are online within 100 milliseconds.

The Composable Commerce Success Formula

The new platform is built using a Composable architecture. In short, this means that we selected several best-fit microservices to create Plaisio's ideal platform. The new Composable platform is strong, scalable, and flexible. It can handle many visitors quickly and easily. In addition to serving 21 million pages per month, the platform must be able to update a large number of products every day without affecting the website's speed. This quality is consistent, even during peak times that would be limiting otherwise.

But what were the 'best-fit microservices' for Plaisio? We’ve highlighted three of these carefully selected microservices:

Contentstack: for flexible and reusable content management via a headless CMS.
Commercetools: for scalable product and order management.
Constructor: for personalized search results and recommendations.

This combination creates a robust, scalable, and flexible platform that can effortlessly handle peak loads and process large amounts of content and products on a daily basis.

Conclusion: Powerful and Personal

For large retailers, a Composable platform is currently the most powerful e-commerce solution you can deploy. Plaisio's B2B platform is powerful, fast, personal, and can scale during peak times. Now that this milestone has been reached, we are moving on to the next step: adding the B2C part to the newly launched platform. In our previous collaboration, we revamped Plaisio's B2C platform, helping them increase their conversion by 30%. Now that Composable solutions are available, we can make this platform even more powerful.

Are you looking for a new ecommerce platform, and are you interested in what a Composable platform can do for your company? Feel free to contact us!

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Our E-Commerce Specialists

We've built converting e-commerce platforms for our customers for more than 15 years.

Ready for the next step?

You don't just pick a new e-commerce platform. Especially with the sheer volume of available vendors and services. What's the best course of action? Together we will determinate the technical solution that best fits your business goals. Do you want to know how we approach e-commerce projects? We'd love to start a conversation!

Get the right insights!

Joost Meijles

E-Commerce Solutions Specialist

Roel Kuik

Digital Experience Expert