A living E-commerce based on Salesforce Commerce Cloud

About Plantagen

Plantagen is Scandinavia's leading retailer in plants and garden accessories with 140 physical stores in three countries – Sweden, Norway and Finland. Historically, this is a highly analog type of business, with physical stores located in suburban areas, with peak season between March and August.

Background

The gardening shopping behavior has for a long time been that you take your station wagon or trailer to one of the mall-like shops outside of town to buy large amounts of soil and plants just as spring time approaches, while you would happily go to your local flower shop when you want to buy roses for your sweetheart.

Plantagen saw an opportunity to be the first among the larger players on the gardening scene to be able to offer a complimentary shopping possibility when creating a digital offering. An offering that gets you the simplicity of shopping from your sofa, no matter if you're shopping for a nice clay pot, a bunch of tulips, an entire hedge or 100 kilograms of dress soil.

Scope

In coordination with the deployment of Plantagens new ERP M3, Star Republic was awarded the prestigious task to create Plantagens new digital commerce platform. In order to cope with the huge catalogue of products that is Plantagens, it was evident from the start that the future e-commerce platform would have to be supported with a capable PIM system.

The selected e-commerce platform was Salesforce Commerce Cloud, with an extremely high reliability and performance record as a big contributing factor to the choice. Besides being a highly capable eCom engine in itself, Salesforce also has impressive personalization possibilities thanks to its AI-powered Einstein engine. For Star Republic, this also posed an exciting opportunity, as this was not only our first implementation of the platform in Sweden (several has been made by our European sister companies within SQLI), but also in regards to working with living plants and the challenge that it poses.

Solution

The full project started off with a highly collaborative pre-study where we, during a series of workshops chiseled out the project and its needs. First off was the choice of InRiver as PIM platform. Early on it was also discovered that two different setups of InRiver was needed – one for the B2C operations and the other one for SABA, the newly purchased B2B part of Plantagen.

The next task to tackle was the setup of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Seven developers were sent to London to be certified on the platform and we set to work. One of the big challenges in this project was that, in order to be able to deliver living products, the deliveries had to be done with three different stores as shipping warehouses – to a limited area surrounding these warehouses. Therefore functionality had to be built to point the possible customer towards a specific warehouse depending on their postal code. This, combined with a product catalogue containing everything from flower seeds to outdoor sofas, also meant the implementation of Ingrid, a dynamic logistics platform that in real-time provides the e-commerce with shipping costs and shipping times of all products and delivery nodes.

A customer loyalty system from Voyado was also integrated to administrate memberships and individual discounts. An AR system, making it possible to try a plant or christmas tree in your own living room, was also implemented.

Result

The result is one of the fastest SFCC-based e-commerce sites there is, with an excellent uptime and sales surpassing the clients initial estimations. Once the platform was released, further development was immediately started, with one of the first projects being to add drop-shipment functionality. This will provide not only a wider catalogue of products, but also enable Plantagen to sell to customers that are situated far from a Plantagen store. The Plantagen Unified Commerce experience will continue to progress during the 2020s – a journey we at Star Republic are very proud of being a part of.