Headless commerce architecture places global success on the table for luxury brand

Premium glassware and tableware manufacturer, Riedel Glas demonstrates how a flexible microservices architecture enables successful country-specific eCommerce solutions

MUNICH (Germany) / KUFSTEIN (Austria), November 4, 2020 – Customers have never been interested in how complex the systems behind a well-functioning online store is. However, they do value the smooth online interactions they enable. Today’s customers demand intuitive navigation, appealing design and ordering features that allow them to complete purchases with just a few clicks – no matter where they are in the world. These factors are in particular demand by the international luxury brand market, where the customer is absolute monarch, and the eCommerce kingdom they reign over is run on the highest cost efficiency and is fully safeguarded for the future.

Riedel, the internationally recognised German brand providing exclusive, high-quality wine glasses and tableware, faced this challenge of perfecting the online experience for high value customers across multiple regions. Operating in more than 120 countries worldwide with subsidiaries in North America, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany and France, the brand needed to move merchandise management, distribution channels and communication to a centrally controlled, unified sales platform after the relaunch of its homepage. Its aim was to create a platform that was able to meet the necessary growth goals, current and future technical challenges and cater for constantly changing customer demands.

For companies undergoing international expansion, it is crucial that the eCommerce platform takes country-specific requirements into account with individually designed solutions to engaging and inspiring customers most effectively. The way that a customer typically navigates a website varies significantly from Australia to Europe, but customers from both regions should still be able to buy their desired products with the least amount of friction and the highest measure of delight.

A modern commerce platform based on a microservices architecture from the commercetools was the chosen solution for Riedel. Using a modular approach and over 300 available microservices, a headless architecture from commercetools provided the basis for implementing requirements flexibly, quickly and with flawless agility, thus offering Riedel a clear competitive advantage across all regional markets. With vastly reduced time-to-market cycles as a result of an extensive and detailed combination of microservices, Riedel is able to meet individual customisation requirements for individual countries, even for the smallest functions. Since the flexible microservices architecture allows for specific rules to be easily applied, Riedel can cater for each of its customer demographics simultaneously. For example, a special edition for private customers during the Chinese New Year can be integrated into the product portfolio just as easily as a dealer-specific discount campaign for catering sector customers in Australia.

Riedel anticipates serving more regions in the future, producing more individual adaptations of its website and online shops, introducing more services and achieving more successful interactions with customers. A flexible and scalable modern commerce platform removes all the barriers to achieving customer delight, allowing for seamless global growth.