First-class, innovative vehicle technology – that’s what the BMW Group has always stood for as a leading, premium automobile manufacturer. To future-proof this pioneering role, the company needed to embrace digital commerce to its full potential.
The BMW Group chose commercetools as the backbone of its new eCommerce system to consolidate all digital commerce activities, enabling sales across multiple touchpoints and combining its diverse product portfolio under one roof. From the sale of cars and accessories to digital services such as “Functions on Demand,” as well as services including oil and tire changes, every commerce interaction works with the new solution.
Selling to markets worldwide and housing a huge selection of product and service brands were ambitious requirements for the new eCommerce solution for BMW Group. The in-car commerce sector, in particular, demonstrated a massive development leap in recent years: vehicle functions that were previously available only as optional extras can now be purchased as “Functions on Demand” in the BMW Shop and installed over the air instantly on the car. This technical finesse requires that all the tech stack components work seamlessly, an essential requirement where commercetools proved its suitability through prototype tests for in-car commerce and more – ultimately convincing the BMW Group thanks to the impressive results.
From the start, it was clear that BMW needed a powerful, customizable solution to offer its customers the premium experience that the BMW Group stands for. “Composable” was the right path due to the combination of multiple functions and best-of-breed systems that could be integrated into in-house solutions. Basic functions, such as product catalog, shopping cart and orders, had to be available quickly, and existing systems like PIMs, CMS, warehouse and fulfillment had to be easy to integrate. Finally, the commerce functions needed to be available on different touchpoints. commercetools delivered on all fronts thanks to a successful API implementation and cloud ecosystem.
Full throttle ahead to the eCommerce of the future
In cooperation with the Professional Services Team from commercetools, a client proof-of-concept was created, allowing all brands and markets part of the BMW Group to be mapped against existing projects, stores and channels on the commerce solution. Existing services with excellent extensibility were a big plus during the implementation. Various in-house programming complemented commercetools via easily connected API interfaces. This included a partially headless-based CMS, the internally programmed data management and payment system, and the application responsible for checking whether products can be combined.
With its cloud-based headless commerce solution, commercetools offers an uncomplicated integration with inventory systems. In this way, existing processes can be retained and customers can experience modern and high-performance eCommerce at the same time.
Product Owner (Business), BMW Group
The software implementation could be deployed piece by piece along the customer journey. In just under eight months, the tech team that was set up in the summer of 2020 delivered the first go-live in March 2021.
Read the BMW possibility story to learn more about the BMW Group's digital commerce transformation.
Are you interested in how other automotive enterprises made the journey to commercetools? Then read our Audi and Volkswagen customer possibility stories.