Customer story

Nederlandse Spoorwegen

Travel & Leisure

How Nederlandse Spoorwegen turned commerce modernization into 50% more ticket sales

50%

increase in ticket sales

4x/week

releases, up from once a month

50%

fewer customer service calls

NS double-decker train at a Dutch station

TL;DR

Nederlandse Spoorwegen replaced its legacy Intershop platform with commercetools to build a scalable commerce foundation. Ticket sales increased by 50%, while customer service calls related to online ticket sales fell by 50%. The new platform also accelerated time-to-market, enabling releases up to 4x per week, compared with once a month previously.

Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) is the state-owned Dutch railway company that operates 4,800 domestic trains daily for over 1.1 million passengers.

Region

EMEA

Industry

Travel & Leisure

Migrated from

Intershop

Markets

Headquarters

Utrecht, Netherlands

Worked with partners

AWS, Conclusion Experience

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.

Availability issues

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. Downtime was estimated to cost around EUR 10,000 per hour in lost revenue.

Stalled 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.

Technical debt

Years of customizations had created significant technical debt. Core commerce capabilities were spread across five different systems, and the reliance on legacy Java technology made it increasingly difficult to attract and retain engineering talent.

Key capabilities and outcomes

Headless, cloud-native platform built on commercetools B2C Commerce for web and mobile touchpoints
Unified commerce capabilities including product management, pricing, discounts and order orchestration
5 fragmented systems replaced by one central commerce layer
Phased migration starting with an MVP for online day tickets
Scalable architecture for growth from 20 million orders in 2025 to 50+ million by 2028
Near-100% uptime with improved reliability during peak demand

The goals: Reducing complexity while improving reliability

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.

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. 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. The full phased migration 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 results: 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. Ticket sales increased by 50%, reaching over 20 million travel tickets a year, and the platform delivers near-100% uptime and reliability.

-50%

Improved stability and scalability

Despite increased sales volumes, NS saw a 50% reduction in customer service calls related to online ticket sales, with each contact center interaction averaging approximately EUR 11. 2024 was the first King's Day in five years without performance issues.

4x/week

Faster innovation

Features that previously required months of development, or were considered impossible, can now be delivered within days, including dynamic pricing. With a modular architecture and no customizations in the core, DevOps moved from roughly 30:70 maintenance versus innovation to 10:90.

Talent

Modern technology that attracts and retains talent

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 a future-ready platform.

What's next: Unified commerce for all revenue streams

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.