E-Commerce growth foundation for Sligro

Migrating a high revenue-generating E-commerce platform for food-professionals. Offering a better experience to customers. Enabling IT to quickly deploy new functions to any or all channels and scale automatically on performance needs. Giving Marketing the tools they need to understand, advise, and inspire their customers even more. In short: creating a new platform that can fulfill the current and future ambitions of Sligro Food Group.

Sligro Food Group wanted to replace its yet existing E-commerce platform. The platform was vertically divided among their main brands: Sligro, Sligro ISPC, and Van Hoeckel with different levels of digital maturity. This rigid architecture limited Sligro’s capabilities to bring new initiatives to the market fast.

The ambition of Sligro to grow nationally and internationally resulted in 3 main requirements:

• A stable and flexible digital commerce and engagement platform, that facilitates quick rollout of new features, businesses, and formulas.
• Integration of inspirational content in the transactional user flow.
• Match or exceed the store experience and support differentiation between the individual brands.

Migrate and reimagine the E-commerce experience, enabling customers to search, browse, purchase products and lay the foundation for a food platform that will help Sligro reach a long-term independent position on the European foodservice market. 

What we did

A best practices E-commerce foundation for Sligro to learn and explore new digital initiatives. In line with Sligro's strategy & growth ambitions, a scalable solution that allows new formulas to be brought to the market fast. A full E-commerce and engagement suite with data & analytics integrated for personalisation and segmentation. 

• Consulting
• Design
• E-commerce Platform Development
• Customer Engagement
• Quality Assurance
• Application Management
• Cloud Management (AWS and Kubernetes)

Sligro wants to grow nationally and internationally. E-commerce and engagement needed to become better integrated, so that: 

• B2B users have a frictionless commerce experience
• Customers can enjoy inspirational content and do business in a single journey without any friction 
• Customers can be better targeted based on their profile and preferences 
• New functionalities and services, such as the integration of Heineken, can be rolled out much quicker, benefitting all brands at once 
• New acquisitions, like de Kweker, can easily and effectively be migrated to an industry leading food platform

The project delivered improved versions of the current sites and most importantly lays a solid foundation for future developments at an ever-increasing pace. The first E-commerce formula (ISPC) was live in just 4 months.

Launch Fast

ISPC, Sligro’s second acquisition outside of the Netherlands, needed a replacement of their E-commerce platform. Fast. The existing platform was old and previous migrations failed. There was no time to wait for detailed specifications or finished functionalities for the main platform, which is why this side project was developed and delivered fast.

A new digital platform was technically delivered, live, in less than 4,5 months, leveraging the capabilities of the SAP Commerce Cloud accelerator, while tailoring it to the exact requirements of ISPC. The result is a platform that drives digital growth at ISPC successfully.

Engage and Convert

Customers will love the intuitive way of creating new orders based on their history or custom order lists. The newly defined store brand experience served was adopted and adapted to craft the design of the new digital platform. The customer journey was further optimized by integrating inspirational content and transactional features.

Scalable Platform to support Sligro's Ambitions

Sligro’s ambition to grow its presence outside of The Netherlands is now supported by an evolutionary architecture due to its modular components based on SAP Commerce (CX) and Adobe AEM.

Our blended teams worked together on the design of the solution, matching existing functionality while exploring new opportunities. This resulted in a user-centred and technically feasible design, balancing business value with project impact. The Sligro digital team will enjoy the freedom of creating new layouts and new experiences for all, or specific customer groups. All the time, much care has been given to maximizing future flexibility and adaptability of the complete solution.

The experts from Sligro, SQLI, Sentia and Amplexor are working as a single, blended team, committed to building a platform combining end-customer needs and business objectives. We all got the opportunity to work closely together and learn from Sligro’s customers, their context, and their priorities. The new platform is designed to enhance empathy and to engage visitors better, by learning to respond to their personal profile and preferences. Technically the AEM frontend is loosely coupled with the SAP Commerce Cloud transactional backend which makes the solution more scalable and better maintainable making Sligro future-proof and ready for growth.

The success of this project has established a close partnership between Sligro and SQLI for many years to follow.