Plaisio grows 32% with new B2B e-commerce platform

A laptop and a phone showing the new interface of Plaisio's B2B platform.

The result

We developed a scalable, flexible, and fast solution for Plaisio to offer their B2B customers a better experience. With this renewed technical power, they can now effortlessly serve 21 million pages per month, scale up efficiently for peak moments like Black Friday, and update 3.75 billion unique prices at lightning speed. Thanks to a strong technical foundation, they have a Composable platform that continues to perform effortlessly even under high pressure, where products are easier to find, and customers can go through a streamlined process.

Following the launch of the new Composable platform, Plaisio saw significant results:

+10% increase in orders
+31% Average Order Value (AOV)
+19% Average Basket Size (ABS)
+32% daily turnover

The new Composable platform immediately eliminated all bottlenecks: Plaisio can once again expand the product catalog, scale up campaigns, onboard new B2B clients, and continuously expand the platform with new functionalities. Moreover, Plaisio can now effortlessly handle peak moments without downtime, delays, or other disruptions to the customer experience.

Furthermore, this system is highly future-proof: thanks to the Composable architecture, the platform is flexible and easy to expand. The platform can therefore always continue to grow with Plaisio.

Branche:

Retail

Customers:

50 miljoen

Products Tools:

40.000

commercetools, Contentstack, Constructor, Cloudinary, Vercel, Contact Pigeon, Talon.One

Website:

https://www.plaisio.gr/

De B2B webwinkel van Plaisio, gepresenteerd op mobiel en tablet.

“The new B2B platform exceeds all our expectations. From day one, our main bottlenecks have disappeared. This platform gives us full control again and room to grow.” – Socrates Fotiou, projectmanager Plaisio

Who is Plaisio?

Plaisio is the market leader in Greece and Bulgaria for consumer electronics, gaming, mobile devices, office supplies, and photo and computer equipment. With 50 million visitors annually, they possess a substantial customer base. Customers are assisted by 1,500 employees in 27 branches, and online via the Plaisio webshop.

Our partnership began in 2017 and grew into a strategic collaboration in which we provide structural input regarding functionality, technology, and integration with Plaisio's other systems. Thanks to this strong bond of trust, we have since renewed the entire e-commerce platform, encompassing both B2C and B2B.

Requirements for the new platform

Plaisio wanted a flexible, scalable, and future-proo Composable B2B platform. For this, they were looking for:

1. Rapid scalability to run large campaigns like Black Friday and Back to School smoothly.

2. Displaying and efficiently managing a unique price per customer, per product: 3.75 billion in total.

3. Price updates must be calculated within 100 milliseconds.

4. Product updates must be processed within 5 minutes.

5. The system must be able to handle 21 million page requests per month, with a peak load of 200,000 per hour.

We went through a thorough process with Plaisio to select the right services. Plaisio subsequently chose to build the platform using Contentstack, Constructor, Cloudinary, commercetools, Vercel, Talon.One and Contact Pigeon. By collaborating with MACH Alliance certified partners, we laid a strong and future-proof foundation.

The platform: personal and effective

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 frequently needed products - such as office supplies - can be easily reordered. Based on order history, Plaisio can then make recommendations, allowing customers to discover interesting new products.

Plaisio’s personalization goes beyond simply being able to adjust product prices: a customer support team is assigned to each organization, ensuring that a customer can always make direct personal contact and waiting times are minimized.

Your personal support team is ready to assist you.

Because their catalog contains 40,000 products, it is of utmost importance that Plaisio provides overview and clarity. As a result, customers can create an organization-specific catalog and receive an overview of purchases by category in their purchase history. Furthermore, Plaisio can make time-saving suggestions by offering relevant product lists. This ensures that it is always clear where budgets are going and minimizes the search time for relevant products. If a customer still can't quite figure something out, the personal support team is ready to assist.

All B2B customers always have insight into their expenses through a handy analysis section.

You always have insight into your purchases.

B2B pricing does not work the same way as B2C pricing: for B2B sales, price negotiations always take place per customer. This means that a different price can be applied per product and per customer. This is a complex issue for Plaisio, as it involves potentially 3.75 billion different prices. There are no existing Composable services capable of handling this. We sank our teeth into this challenge and built a unique custom solution. Now, all prices can be displayed, and they are all calculated super fast -within 100 milliseconds!- in Plaisio’s back-office.

Socrates Fotiou, Chief Information Officer at Plaisio.

"The strength of our collaboration lies in the long term. Aviva remains closely involved after delivery and provides us with structural support in the further development of the platform. New ideas and changing business needs are quickly translated into concrete solutions. This allows us to remain flexible and innovative."
-Socrates Fotiou, projectmanager Plaisio

Managed Services stays involved

Our service does not end after the launch: as a full-service digital agency, we remain involved. We continuously work proactively on improvements to optimize performance. For instance, we are working on streamlining and improving the logging of technical events and looking for ways to enhance performance. This allows Plaisio to take full advantage of their new Composable B2B webshop.

This B2B webshop was the first part of Plaisio’s entirely new Composable platform. This Composable platform forms a powerful foundation, to which we have also connected the B2C webshop. As a result, Plaisio has one integrated platform with two different webshops.

This platform formed a powerful foundation for the future: we used the development of the B2B webshop as the starting point to renew the entire e-commerce platform. By developing the platform to also serve as the basis for the new B2C webshop, Plaisio now has one integrated platform with two webshops.