For an international B2B sales organisation we digitized a webshop that simply didn't fit a standard e-commerce framework. This kind of assortment has quirks no off-the-shelf package handles well: products related to each other by size, type, season and vehicle, per-market pricing structures, mounting and logistics arrangements, and strict requirements on product-data correctness.
After serious consideration we deliberately chose a custom solution. That's not always the right answer, but it was here: too many essential features would have had to live as awkward exceptions inside a standard package, and those exceptions are exactly the core of the value the client wants to deliver.
The front end was fed from MagnoliaCMS, where content was managed in structured form and published through an elaborate publication flow, with Akamai in front for caching and worldwide delivery. On the back-end was Spring Boot, with Elasticsearch as the engine behind product search and filtering. The latter was not a luxury: a customer looking for the right parts for their vehicle wants to land on the right set within a few taps, not click through thirteen dropdowns.
Authentication and authorization ran through Keycloak, giving us a clean separation between identity and business logic. Different roles — private customers, business customers, dealers, admins — see a different slice of the webshop with different prices, stock, and options, and that had to be defined centrally and demonstrably.
Content was managed in MagnoliaCMS, a Java CMS that suits multilingual, structured content at scale. Translatability was a hard requirement: the webshop runs in multiple markets with content differences that aren't just language but also tone of voice, legal text, and marketing.
The combination of deliberately chosen technologies, a team that covered both front- and back-end well, and tight scope agreements with the client brought the webshop to a successful conclusion — and at the same time positioned it for expansion into new markets and product ranges.
Outcomes
- Four roles separated through Keycloak, each with its own prices, stock and options
- Product search and filtering on Elasticsearch instead of nested dropdowns
- Multilingual, structured content for several markets managed in MagnoliaCMS