How ARK Bokhandel penned a new eCommerce success story with a 15% conversion lift

Meeting customer expectations for a smooth online book-buying experience was a chapter filled with challenges for ARK Bokhandel. The bookstore chain struggled to keep up with demand, especially during peak seasons, which hindered its growth. Nearly half of ARK’s annual sales occur in the fourth quarter of the year. Yet, instead of welcoming increased online traffic, the company was forced to limit the number of users to prevent crashes — an unacceptable trade-off for a growing business.

 These issues — and many others — kept cropping up after ARK Bokhandel’s decade of relying on a monolithic SAP Hybris system. One of the most critical pain points was the platform’s unreliable integration with ARK’s ERP system. The two systems were tightly coupled, meaning that any issue on one side could cascade and bring down the other. For instance, the ERP system often faced downtime when the website experienced a surge in traffic. 

In addition, the previous system could only handle up to 3,000 simultaneous users. Exceeding that threshold led to severe performance issues, which translated into severe disruptions to the customer experience and negatively impacted the bottom line. 

The root cause for these issues lay with SAP Hybris’ outdated platform, which hosted a patchwork of different technologies, including three frameworks for the frontend alone. This complexity meant that no one within the company fully understood the system, making even minor changes cumbersome and time-consuming. 

Unsurprisingly, the technical debt accumulated over the years, with development resources primarily allocated to fixing bugs rather than introducing new features. As much as 80% of the development efforts were spent on maintenance rather than innovation. Deployments were another significant obstacle; rolling out updates required taking the entire site offline for several hours, often at night, further restricting ARK’s ability to adapt quickly to market demands. 

As the inefficiencies of the legacy system had become a bottleneck to achieving both technology and business goals, ARK Bokhandel set out to adopt a more agile and scalable solution. The goal was to eliminate technical constraints, enhance system reliability and ultimately improve the customer experience across all digital channels. Moreover, the bookstore chain aimed to empower in-house developers with the autonomy to manage integrations without being dependent on external consultants.

To turn the page in eCommerce and modernize its digital presence with maximized flexibility, ARK Bokhandel selected commercetools Composable Commerce for B2C to integrate components according to its specific needs. Bringing this technology stack to life was a testimony to the best-of-breed approach; in addition to commercetools, ARK plugged Omnium for OMS, Sanity for CMS, Algolia for search, Bluestone PIM for product management and Microsoft Azure for cloud hosting. The system integrators TRY Dig and S5 Consulting led the swift implementation. 

Omnium OMS was a crucial element of the new architecture, which acted as the central hub for data flow between SAP ERP, commercetools and Bluestone PIM. With a highly optimized API and cloud-native infrastructure, the upgraded tech stack ensured seamless communication across systems, eliminating operational bottlenecks and allowing ARK to scale effortlessly. 

Implementation of the new system was swift. ARK decided to halt development on the outdated platform and shift all resources toward launching the new online store as quickly as possible. Within two months, an MVP (minimum viable product) was up and running, covering about 90% of the intended functionality. The entire project, from inception to launch, was completed in nine months.

commercetools’ capabilities played a pivotal role in ARK’s digital transformation — facilitated by the extensive developer documentation that, according to Anders Martinsson, Head of Technology, “is by far the best-documented piece of software I ever used.” 

ARK tapped into the flexibility of pricing capabilities to roll out a wide range of loyalty strategies and even B2B-specific pricing. Furthermore, ARK leveraged advanced promotional tools such as coupons, bundled discounts and three-for-two offers. The checkout process was optimized with an ultra-fast checkout and additional capabilities that improve the customer experience, including guest checkout, local payment methods like Norwegian mobile payment application Vipps, and real-time inventory checks for click-and-collect services across physical bookstores. 

The new system also streamlined operations with the Merchant Center, commercetools’ no-code admin tool for business users, who can manage pricing, discounts and promotional management with an easy-to-use UI. The result: Increased automation that enhances efficiency, reduces manual work and allows ARK to focus on continuous innovation.

The composable architecture of ARK’s eCommerce solution has resulted in remarkable business growth. In the first week after launch, ARK processed 17,000 orders in a single day, demonstrating the improved scalability and performance of the new system. The conversion rate saw an impressive increase of over 15%, now ranging from 7% to 14% depending on campaigns, significantly higher than the previous 4-5%. Within the first month of launch, revenue surged by 25% and keeps growing.  

Behind these incredible business results lies a huge increase in internal efficiency when the team works with some of the best tools available for eCommerce and a modern architecture that the developers love to work with. This helps the company to reduce the time required to turn ideas into products and embrace a culture of incremental innovation. The ability to push updates frequently allows ARK to continuously refine its platform, with development efforts now focused 80% on new enhancements and features but less than 20% on bug fixes. 

In the past year alone, the company deployed over 800 updates, averaging two to three daily deployments, which take just three minutes to complete and occur without downtime. In other words, ARK can make incremental enhancements to the customer journey without disrupting the user experience. “The smaller deployment, the less risk,” said Anders Martinsson. “This allows us to perform small changes and evaluate how they resonate with customers. And even if an error happens, it takes three minutes to fix it through the faster deployments we now have.” 

Looking ahead, ARK aims to integrate its online, mobile and in-store experiences further. Plans include upgrading the POS system to create a seamless omnichannel experience, enabling store associates to access customer order histories, offering personalized recommendations and processing returns without paper receipts. This 360-degree customer view powered by a unified commerce approach will enhance service and engagement across all touchpoints, laying a foundation for future innovation and growth.