GROWING ONLINE & OFFLINE WITH A STRONG BRAND

The project started as a major strategy consultancy. Initially, the plan of Reformhaus and us was to set up a large marketplace with connected retailers and their own ERPs for sales and customer data. But after extensive workshops, meetings and strategy sessions, Reformhaus decided that this project would be too large and costly. 

So Shopify Plus plan came into play. Although it couldn't cover the same marketplace functions as the previous solution, it was possible to combine content and shop, integrate Plentymarkets as a cloud-based e-commerce platform and all at a significantly lower price. This is how our first major Shopify project was launched and at the same time one of the largest Shopify projects in Germany. As always, we work agile and with an MVP to achieve a fast time-to-market.

Strengthen the shops and still position the online shop strongly. Both were to be realized and both were to contribute to the Reformhaus brand. To achieve this, in addition to migrating all content to the new shop page, we also linked many products directly in the guides so that they can be placed in the shopping basket directly after reading or during the process.  Thousands of content pieces with different designs, including CSS, had to be migrated and standardized for the brand. A complex filtering logic was integrated to make the recipes and other content easy to find. For example, content can be sorted and filtered by occasion, effort, health or cookery school. 
We have also developed our own store app, which uses the postcode to display all shops within a given radius on a map. The special feature: As soon as a user is assigned to a shop, this is communicated to the ERP in the background and future online sales are allocated to this shop on a pro rata basis. However, this is also possible via UTM parameters or adverts if the user does not select a shop. As a transparent feature for the customer, the price per kg/litre is displayed in the shop frontend to make it easier to compare individual products with different content quantities. The lowest price of the last 30 days is also displayed there. 
All of this was developed for the cooperative members, because they make Reformhaus what it is - a major brand known throughout Germany.

To support the needs of the members, a complex logic with regional location offers was developed in the background. This means that every customer can be guaranteed an individualized shopping experience even without a marketplace model. At the same time, the brand experience is standardized across the entire site and pays tribute to the Reformhaus brand. An existing Shopify theme was used as the basis and then customized and further developed to meet the needs of Reformhaus.