Nederlandse Spoorwegen

The challenge: Keeping pace with growing digital demand

Over the last few years, Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) has seen demand for digital ticket sales grow rapidly, as travelers increasingly expect to research and purchase tickets anytime, anywhere. However, its legacy eCommerce platform, built on Intershop, struggled to keep pace, creating challenges across customer experience, platform reliability, security and operational efficiency.

The monolithic platform led to frequent availability issues that directly affected travelers. During major peak events such as King’s Day, customers were often unable to retrieve tickets they had already purchased, resulting in a sharp increase in customer service calls. In a year, NS received about 100,000 calls with similar issues. 

At the same time, the platform presented growing security and reliability risks that could no longer be adequately addressed, with downtime estimated to cost around EUR 10,000 per hour in lost revenue.

The legacy platform also limited innovation. Customers could purchase only a single ticket per transaction, making it difficult to introduce new offers such as group tickets and other travel products. Because the platform was delivered as a tightly coupled solution, upgrades became increasingly complex, costly and risky, slowing the introduction of new capabilities.

From a technology perspective, years of customizations had created significant technical debt. Core commerce capabilities were spread across five different systems, making the landscape difficult to maintain and evolve. The reliance on legacy Java technology also made it increasingly difficult to attract and retain engineering talent.

Despite these limitations, digital ticket sales continued to grow, reinforcing the need for a more scalable and future-ready commerce platform. NS set out to reduce platform complexity, improve reliability and scalability, accelerate time-to-market, lower operational costs and deliver a better customer experience across every sales channel. 

To achieve this, the company embarked on a modernization program built around a headless, cloud-native and composable architecture powered by commercetools in order to support the ambitious growth from 20 million orders in 2025 to over 50 million in 2028.

The solution: Building a scalable commerce foundation 

After a thorough procurement process for an enterprise commerce platform, NS selected commercetools B2C Commerce to replace its legacy Intershop platform and establish a more flexible foundation for future growth.

The headless architecture enabled NS to decouple customer-facing channels from backend systems, making it easier to support multiple touchpoints, such as the web shop and mobile app. At the same time, NS centralized core commerce capabilities, including product management, pricing, discounts and order orchestration, replacing fragmented functionality spread across five systems.

To manage the transition, NS adopted a greenfield approach with a dedicated team building the new platform while another team continued operating the legacy environment. Significant effort went into architectural design to ensure that the limitations of the old platform weren’t replicated. The team first validated approximately 80% of the required functionality, reducing business risk before expanding the migration.

The first milestone was an MVP that enabled online sales of day tickets, laying the foundation for adding more complex propositions and customer journeys, including combo offers and other commercial products. The full phased migration, completed just after, was supported by commercetools, AWS and Conclusion Experience.

commercetools has enabled NS to turn eCommerce from a channel-specific solution into a strategic business capability. With a flexible and scalable foundation, we can support growing transaction volumes, deliver better customer experiences, and accelerate innovation across the organization.

Jan Pieter Kreeftenberg

Product Owner, Nederlandse Spoorwegen

The result: From operational challenges to business value

The migration to commercetools has significantly improved both the customer experience and NS’s ability to grow with digital commerce to the point that the company increased ticket sales by 50%, reaching over 20 million travel tickets a year. Today, the platform delivers near-100% uptime and reliability, providing a strong foundation for increasing transaction volumes as digital sales continue to grow.

This improved stability has had a direct impact on customers and operations. Despite increased sales volumes, NS saw a 50% reduction in customer service calls related to online ticket sales, improving customer satisfaction while reducing costs, as each contact center interaction averages approximately EUR 11. During peak moments, the difference is equally clear: 2024 was the first King’s Day in five years without performance issues, eliminating the need for teams to operate in high-alert mode during major events.

The new architecture has also transformed NS’s ability to innovate. Features that previously required months of development — or were considered impossible due to legacy limitations — can now be delivered within days. This includes strategic capabilities such as dynamic pricing. 

By adopting a modular architecture without customizations in the commercetools core, NS has reduced operational complexity, increased delivery speed and enabled teams to release new functionality up to four times per week. The DevOps focus has shifted from maintaining systems to creating value, moving from roughly 30:70 maintenance versus innovation to 90:10.

The modernization has also strengthened NS’s engineering organization. Working with a modern, cloud-native architecture has made it easier to attract and retain talent, while engineers benefit from greater ownership, faster delivery cycles and the ability to build on a future-ready platform.

Looking ahead, NS is expanding the role of commercetools beyond digital ticket sales to become the unified commerce platform for all revenue streams, including subscriptions, international sales, ticket vending machines and service counters. 

As transaction volumes are expected to grow from approximately 20 million orders in 2025 to more than 50 million by 2028, NS is using a phased approach to simplify its technology landscape, replacing channel-specific logic with reusable APIs, centralized order orchestration and shared commerce capabilities. The ambition is a mission-critical commerce platform that provides the reliability, scalability and flexibility needed for the future of rail travel.