neuland and the Fricke Group – Development of a flexible B2B shop platform

Since 2010, neuland has been supporting the Fricke Group, one of the largest providers of spare parts and services in the agricultural, forestry and construction industries, in the development of its e-commerce platform. Special emphasis is placed on flexibility through decoupling and ERP-agnostic architecture. We present our long-standing collaboration.

B2B software is deeply integrated and must interact quickly and reliably with the company's systems, partners and customers. Fricke has been relying on neuland for years to meet these requirements and continuously develop them further. We support the development of the store with a stable development team.

Fricke is a successful, owner-managed family business with over 100 years of market presence. It is active in 27 countries with 84 locations and offers over 13 million items. In 2022, the group achieved a turnover of over one billion euros. The Fricke Group's development and success since it was founded in 1923 has been determined by efficient processes and a focus on the customer. This is one of the reasons why our product range is particularly well suited to our customers' requirements.

Development of the store platform

Phase 1: Decoupling and scalability

In 2010, neuland started with the implementation of a Hybris system that is largely decoupled from the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and can handle high loads flexibly. A new GRANIT webshop was developed, which to this day ensures smooth communication with the ERP and takes into account the special requirements of the agricultural machinery business as well as the international presence. As an international spare parts wholesaler, the Fricke Group was already processing the majority of its orders in the GRANIT PARTS division online.

Our work at Fricke enables a smooth B2B experience for customers and facilitates the management of different stores and country clients.

Phase 2: Functional enhancements and partner shops

In the second phase, the focus was on functional enhancements and the addition of features - the technical potential of the platform was optimized to support the rapid business development of the Fricke Group.

An exemplary core feature is the introduction of partner stores. Wholesale depends on many different sales channels and selective integration. With the help of the store system, various stores of cooperation partners are also served.

Improvements in the registration and login process as well as the expansion of the product portfolio have been implemented to cover all the needs of B2B customers.

These enhancements support the Fricke Group's rapid business development.

Guaranteeing the quantitative growth of the Fricke Group's wholesale business with the same or higher quality, speed and stability determined the development in this phase.

Core features of the store and the systems

• Separation of backend and frontend: Even the first store separated the backend shopping cart and backend search from the frontend, which enabled HTTP standard caching and still ensures high performance today.

• Webviews for mobile apps: Features are immediately available on all platforms as soon as they are rolled out in the web store. Only a few native features (such as the barcode scanner) are implemented specifically for mobile devices.

• Multiple shopping carts: B2B customers can process several orders at the same time, as several linked shopping carts are possible under one account. This feature was implemented as an in-house development.

• Modern, responsive layout: The web store was converted to a modern and fully responsive layout, which is still considered exemplary in the industry today.

Technical decoupling and flexible architecture

With the development of a new ERP system and the decoupling of the e-commerce domain, efficiency gains will also be possible in the future. Three independent teams ensure seamless, rapid and independent growth:

• Team "Discover" is responsible for product presentation and search.

• The "Buy" team is responsible for the transaction process in the narrower sense, i.e. shopping cart, checkout and payment, customer and employee management and login. It coordinates the joint use of the front-end elements and the development of the necessary tools.

• The "After Sales" team organizes communication relating to fulfilment, in particular returns, warranty, order status and purchase history.

The further development of the technical basis and the decoupling from ERP systems enable the Fricke Group to continue to work efficiently and in a customer-oriented manner.

Flexibility and continuous adaptation as success factors

The long-standing cooperation between neuland and the Fricke Group shows how important flexibility and continuous adaptation are in e-commerce development. We support Fricke in further optimizing international trade and making it more efficient.

Together with the teams from the other verticals, we work with our specialist colleagues on the next stages of development. Technically decoupled and focused on our own domain, but always proud to share the values of the Fricke Group: to work in a customer-oriented, efficient and down-to-earth manner.