Chemist Warehouse

The challenge: Modernizing commerce for complex health retail  

With a mission to make the best in healthcare available at unbeatable prices, Chemist Warehouse is a fixture of daily life for Australians, with an impressive network of 500+ physical stores. With 80% of the Australian population within 5 km of a Chemist Warehouse store, its online presence became essential as a “front door” to its extensive in-store footprint. 

While this omnichannel approach plays a critical role in driving online and in-store revenue — and has become a pillar of the company’s continued growth — the eCommerce platform started to show cracks.

For over 15 years, the company relied on Kentico, building layers of customizations to compensate for a platform that was increasingly difficult and time-consuming to update. As the business scaled rapidly and was further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform was pushed to its limits.

Performance issues began to impact customer experience and business outcomes. Checkout became a major pain point, with increasing abandonment rates. These friction points persisted over time, directly affecting revenue.

The tipping point came on Black Friday 2024, when the website went down during the year’s most critical sales event, resulting in lost revenue.

To continue scaling operations, meet increasing demand and achieve its ambitious five-year plan, Chemist Warehouse’s leadership recognized that modernizing its eCommerce infrastructure was imperative for growth. The company’s goals included:

• Improving customer experience, website functionality and security, making the path to purchase faster and enabling customers to choose their preferred delivery methods, such as Click & Collect.
• Strengthening the omnichannel approach across online, mobile and in-store touchpoints.
• Enabling internal teams to maintain the website effectively and increase innovation output, thereby elevating online experiences. 

As a result of this digital transformation, Chemist Warehouse set a goal to increase conversion rates and double online revenue over five years.  

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The solution: Building a scalable, future-ready commerce foundation

As a starting point, Chemist Warehouse recognized the need for external expertise to run a discovery process and determine requirements across flexibility, scalability, performance and functionality to meet its business goals. To conduct a thorough platform analysis and provide a neutral view of suitable solutions, the retailer engaged Convert Digital, a leading digital commerce agency.

During this exercise, Convert Digital identified that the new eCommerce platform must be able to:

• Strengthen online as a “front door” to 500+ physical stores, handling massive traffic at any point in time from customers checking prices and product availability before visiting a pharmacy.
• Accelerate speed to market for content updates, new features and bug fixing with a modern, API-first technology that enables quicker integration opportunities.  
• Handle site load, scaling from 15K concurrent users on the legacy platform to effectively unlimited capacity. 
• Improve speed and responsiveness with a target benchmark of 1.8 seconds. 
• Enhance security controls and protect customer data with modern technology. 
• Manage Chemist Warehouse’s highly complex requirements for prescription management and patient profiles, with extensibility as a core requirement for specific platform configurations. 
• Provide a future-proof foundation for agentic commerce, enabling the retailer to expose structured product data and real-time inventory via APIs, making products discoverable and shoppable by AI agents. 

In the wake of its merger with Sigma Healthcare, Chemist Warehouse is further strengthening its digital foundation with commercetools’ unified commerce platform, designed to support the scale, complexity and specialized requirements of a vertically integrated pharmacy business to manage sensitive health-related products. 

To further validate that commercetools could handle the massive traffic flowing through the company’s platform, the retailer performed a pre-launch spike test so robust that it broke the internal performance testing engine, while the commercetools platform continued to handle traffic seamlessly.

With commercetools as the core, Chemist Warehouse can now: 

• Handle peak volume across Australia and New Zealand with effectively unlimited concurrent users, fast page loads and high performance.
• Manage over 30K SKUs with complex promotions, from free gifts to targeted campaigns.
• Unify inventory, orders and customer experience data across in-store and online channels.
• Enable flexible development cycles and accelerate deployments and time-to-market for customer-facing features.
• Build functionality outside the core platform to prevent technical debt and ensure future enhancements and scaling remain agile.

Following a best-of-breed approach, Chemist Warehouse leverages specialized tools for key functions without extensive custom development, including Algolia for enhanced search, Akeneo for digital merchandising and Contentful for content management.

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The result: Record-breaking performance and operational agility

After implementing commercetools, the impact on Chemist Warehouse was immediate. The first Black Friday on the new platform delivered the company’s best results in history, with sales up 54% year over year. With limitless scalability — instead of the previous ceiling of 15,000 concurrent users — shoppers could easily find products, check availability and complete checkout in seconds.

Beyond Black Friday, Chemist Warehouse’s teams found it easier to implement promotions, such as the Sports Nutrition Tactical Day. The platform’s ability to handle massive traffic spikes translated into a 400% increase in sales for specific SKUs during this event, with no degradation in site performance.

While seasonal events tested the platform at scale, everyday results were also impressive. In the six months following the replatform, orders increased by 21% YoY, driven by checkout efficiencies that reduced abandonment rates, a faster path to purchase and the ability to execute last-minute promotions to capitalize on trends.

To strengthen omnichannel fulfillment in line with customer expectations, the retailer implemented a unified inventory system, enabling real-time stock visibility across its extensive store network. This ensures that “Click & Collect” services are always accurate and now account for approximately 82% of online sales.

Suppliers also benefited from the transformation. They can now “buy into” specific categories or site areas during key seasonal moments, creating new revenue streams through bespoke layouts and site takeovers.

The digital transformation also positively impacted employees. With commercetools’ flexible platform, developers can launch major features, like Apple Pay integration and fulfillment enhancements, as continuous innovation workstreams. This approach eliminates manual workarounds and “big-bang” projects that previously took months, allowing technical teams to shift from maintenance mode to innovation, increasing output while reducing costs.

Marketers and other business users gained operational autonomy, enabling them to update content, publish pages and create bespoke online experiences quickly, without the manual effort previously required.

Looking ahead, Chemist Warehouse is exploring AI-enabled commerce, beginning by integrating its product catalog into AI platforms as a foundation for future AI-driven shopping experiences and personalized recommendations. 

Combined with ongoing modernization efforts, the company is positioned to further scale online revenue, expand omnichannel capabilities and continue delivering seamless, innovative experiences for customers, suppliers and employees alike.