Kiwi business supplies provider, NXP, has long served enterprises and government agencies across New Zealand. As the midmarket segment emerged as a key growth driver, the distribution company saw an opportunity to act, developing a consumer-like eCommerce site dedicated solely to this market. In the words of CEO Anne-Marie Sutton, here’s how NXP brought its strategy to life with composable commerce.
At NXP, we’ve built our name supplying business essentials to some of New Zealand’s largest corporations and government agencies. With an annual turnover of around NZ$100 million (approximately US$60 million), our heritage is in delivering tailored, high-touch solutions for complex enterprise accounts — customized portals, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) ordering, intricate account structures, and all the operational finesse that comes with servicing some of the country's most discerning organizations.
Our enterprise customers enjoy a deeply customized eCommerce experience through NXPortal, our bespoke online ordering system built to handle complex pricing, account hierarchies and specialist workflows. It does that job well. But it’s also a mature and highly customized platform built on legacy code, which continues to run smoothly thanks to the dedication and expertise of our small in-house team.
While continuing to serve our enterprise customers well, we set our sights on a new growth horizon: The midmarket segment. This was largely untapped territory for us, yet we knew it was brimming with potential. The advantage of targeting small and mid-sized businesses for NXP is that we can sell the same products we already have. The disadvantage, however, is that the midmarket operates very differently from larger enterprises.
For example, midmarket customers don’t need bespoke pricing or a complicated account setup. They want a streamlined, self-service experience where they can sign up in seconds, pay with a credit card, and receive their products quickly. Our existing technology stack dedicated to enterprises wasn’t designed for that (apart from the fast delivery, which all our customers need and get from us).
That said, addressing this market meant a completely distinct sales approach from our enterprise customers: Providing a self-service experience with automated processes behind the scenes that emphasized the efficiency and speed midmarket customers are after. The consumer-like experience is also of paramount importance, from simplifying all touchpoints to offering same-day dispatch of orders every day.
As a starting point, we evaluated eCommerce vendors focused on B2B — including all-in-one SaaS platforms like Shopify. However, we quickly realized that flexibility was our number one priority, and the all-in-one approach of Shopify-like platforms wouldn’t be able to meet this key prerequisite. After all, we didn’t just want to launch a new site for midmarket customers; we also wanted the option to bring our enterprise portal onto the same unified commerce foundation in the future.
The answer for NXP turned out to be composable commerce powered by commercetools. More than enabling us to easily integrate world-class components, from product catalog to checkout, to meet the needs of our target market, composable commerce provides a low-risk model that helps us iterate and experiment with our new strategy without affecting our enterprise-focused business.
Within months of launching our new platform, we were already seeing promising repeat usage, high-value one-off orders (including a NZ$9,000 transaction that came through without any human intervention), and a significant boost in our ability to run and measure promotions in real-time.
Our goal is bold but clear: Triple our midmarket revenue over the next five years.
Digital transformation at NXP: Change management in action
While technology was the visible face of this transformation, change management was the glue that held it together.
From the start, we treated the midmarket eCommerce solution as more than an IT project — a strategic shift for the entire business. We took this story on an internal roadshow, explaining to all parts of the organization why we were targeting the midmarket, how it aligned with our five-year strategy, and what it would mean for the way we worked. That early transparency built understanding and buy-in long before launch day.
We created a new Midmarket Ambassador role, embedded at the leadership table, to champion the initiative and ensure its priorities stayed front and center. The project team pulled talent from across the company — marketing, IT, merchandise, operations, pricing and customer service — because reworking our processes required cross-department collaboration. By the time we were deep in development, almost every department had touched the project in some way.
This level of change wasn’t without challenges. There were times when we had to pull the team back to the original vision to avoid going off track. I was deeply involved in the process along with our CIO and Head of Marketing & CX, so we could course-correct quickly and ensure that every decision aligned with our strategic objectives.
Ultimately, while the project took longer and was harder than we anticipated, we delivered every feature our customers told us they wanted. That resulted from both technology and the shift toward agility, cross-team ownership and customer centricity.
Automating the NXP customer journey with composable commerce
When we started this project, our internal processes were often slow. Because of our previous enterprise-only focus that customized every single process — an amazing experience for our larger clients, but inevitably leading to manual tasks — it was the first time we focused on automation and being fast.
For instance, account creation was a completely manual, paper-based process. A new customer trading account could take weeks to be approved and set up in our ERP. Returns were equally slow and manual. Promotions, again, required manual work and coordination across several teams, while marketing updates to the site were infrequent because making even simple changes meant pulling in technical resources.
The experience didn’t match the expectations of our midmarket customers, who often behave like consumers and want a consumer-like experience. They don’t want to wait for forms to be processed or for a sales rep to call; they want to buy now. To compete in this space, we had to completely rethink — and automate — how we handled onboarding, service and marketing agility.
That’s why we took an “automation excellence” approach — not just using technology to speed up existing processes but to reimagine them around the customer experience and optimize our organizational efficiency.
With composable commerce as a foundation, we’ve been able to combine the best of both worlds — consumer-style speed and simplicity for the buyer, with the automated account management and integration capabilities our business customers (and our employees) rely on. The business benefits we’ve seen so far include:
Account creation has gone from a paper-based, multi-week process to a fully automated flow. Customers can now complete a credit check and have their trading account live in as fast as 20 seconds.
Behind the scenes, this automation meant integrating commercetools with our new customer master data system (Simple MDG), then looping the data back to the SAP ERP — a round trip that required deep scoping between our internal SAP business analyst team, our integration partners and Overdose, our commerce system integrator.
Buyers can now view order history, reprint invoices, update account details and initiate returns — all from their account dashboard. Since launching the self-service portal, customer service inquiries dropped by 92%, freeing up the team to focus on higher-value support.
Our approach started with designing the customer journey in detail upfront in Figma so that every self-service feature was thought through before a single line of code was written. This helped create the big picture before we operationalized the details.
The marketing team can now create, launch and update campaigns without relying on development sprints. As a result, campaign turnaround times have halved, and we’re on track to reduce them by 75% as we refine workflows. Smaller, more targeted promotions are now possible every two weeks, instead of waiting for monthly cycles.
Our strict 3 PM cutoff for same-day dispatch is consistently reliable, reinforcing our brand promise of speed and reliability. We’ve also improved our order completion rate from 75% to 91% over three years, meaning customers receive everything they ordered in a single, on-time delivery. Split shipments — a pain point for both us and our customers — are now far less common.
Automation has also allowed us to grow without increasing headcount, as repetitive admin tasks have been replaced by automated workflows.In addition, pricing optimization and pack size configuration were built to match the way our midmarket customers buy, while still integrating cleanly with our ERP.
Finally, returns are now initiated online and flow directly into our systems. We’re in the final stages of completing full end-to-end automation, which will eliminate the last manual touchpoints.
Perhaps the most important outcome: We’ve built a future-proof foundation that allows us to evolve, from expanding automation to integrating AI-driven personalization. The same architecture will eventually support our midmarket and enterprise portals, giving us a unified commerce ecosystem.
We’re just getting started
Going live wasn’t the finish line. Our immediate priority is driving more traffic and boosting conversions in the midmarket business. We’re using live analytics, heat maps and customer behavior data to fine-tune automation, content and user experience. Real-time reporting on orders and leads helps us act faster than ever.
We’ve invested in new digital marketing capabilities — from online ads to social media — and built the in-house expertise needed to respond more quickly with our composable commerce setup. This means we can test, learn and iterate in weeks, not months.
Beyond the midmarket, our vision is to bring our enterprise NXPortal onto the same composable commerce foundation, unifying our digital presence across all customer segments. For NXP, this will translate into a single, scalable platform that’s easier to maintain and quicker to adapt. With AI and automation increasingly at the heart of our operations, we’re building not just for today’s efficiencies but for tomorrow’s competitive edge.
Most of all, we’re proud of what this project represents: A commitment to our customers’ needs, a refusal to compromise on experience or capability, and a platform built for the next decade of growth. We set out to make it easier for Kiwi businesses to get what they need — quickly, reliably and on their terms. We’ve delivered, and we’ll continue to raise the bar.
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