PostNL
From a traditional postal operator to a logistics service provider
Youwe has been a technical partner of PostNL for years. We have created multiple integrations and a new Magento 2 platform to provide the best service to all the traffic on the platform.
With its 66.000 employees and international activities in 5 European countries, PostNL is not only the national Dutch postal operator but a leading international player in the field of B2C and B2B deliveries and fulfillment. At this moment they are operating a multichannel business model. PostNL is not only involved in e-commerce by taking care of parcel deliveries. To fill the void created by the decrease in physical mail, the national postal service offers a range of digital services sold through a webshop also featuring stamps, gifts, and office material.
PostNL operated several transactional websites for business and private customers, and in 2016, the implementation of the Magento 1 platform integrated with their ERP system facilitated the multichannel business structure. In 2017, PostNL decided to take its e-commerce to a higher level: The PostNL webshop, catering to business and private customers from a single platform and able to process > 250.000 transactions and > a million visitors per year, had to be integrated into one single website and transactional environment.
40%
IT cost reduction
20%
Orders completed on an external platform
3,8%
Orders completed after abandoned cart mail
Together with Youwe, PostNL went through a process towards becoming an agile, digital-first business. The new platform is headless, fully responsive and fit to tackle high traffic and millions of orders every day.
Our solution
SAP ERP Connector
The shop features free and paid products and is connected to four warehouses. The fulfillment is done via the SAP ERP system. PostNL wanted a responsive solution that could easily be coupled with other relevant systems and could integrate the various transactional platforms the company had used separately before.
Magento 2
The company did not only decide to move their new webshop from Magento 1 to Magento 2 but transformed their entire business model in an agile way: An IT-driven approach was carried out in order to build a future-proof, integrated online platform based on Magento. Besides that, Youwe created a connection between Magento and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to arrange that visitors received a mail about their abandoned cart. PostNL wants to bring its service closer to the customer by providing full service online or through a local in-store service point. Youwe made a connection with the Enterprise Service Bus to provide real-time communication with the internal applications of PostNL. PostNL is processing a large volume of orders via the webshop. Seasonal increases in volume also have to be taken into account.
Hosting
This requires a different, suitable hosting architecture. Youwe provides for the complete hosting of the Magento application. We strive for 100% uptime. For that purpose, we apply 24 × 7 support for this environment. All processes are automated and accurately monitored. When problems occur, backup machines are taking over without any inconvenience for the customer
PWA the solution for a personalized website
The PostNL webshop serves business customers of PostNL, consumers, and collectors. To optimally adapt the webshop to each user, pages are adapted to the segments to which the user belonged, and pages are specifically adapted to individual users. This personalization delivers a great result. However, it also provides a relatively heavy burden for the underlying systems. Many applications, including Magento 2 are optimized by caching the views on the pages as much as possible. As pages become more and more personal, this mechanism works less well. Luckily PWA is an ideal solution for this. This is because it can efficiently outsource a part of this dynamic behavior to the user’s browser so that a fast experience can still be offered. Also, the mobile display has been a very important factor in the design and development process from the start. By combining the webshop as a PWA, the experience for mobile users is further optimized. The process of turning the PostNL webshop into a Progressive Web App website consists of 3 phases:
- Phase 1: is part of the functionality (specifically the part that should not be indexed by search engines) built with the techniques that can also be used for a PWA website.
- Phase 2: is the phase of total reconstruction into a PWA. All functionality that is now available must also be available within the PWA front-end.
- Phase 3: the final phase, will be to further improve offline access and to focus on further personalization as is possible with a PWA. Naturally, all of this must be further formed.
The PostNL webshop is a webshop with a considerable volume of orders. By transferring all the functionality in steps, we have made this process manageable and have built trust within the organization. Thanks to both the Magento 2 platform and the PWA the online sales of PostNL have increased tremendously the past few years. Also, the PWA succeeded in the busiest time of the year for PostNL during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. For both companies, the PWA was the best solution and provided great benefits for not only the employees of the companies but especially for the customers using the app.
The results
We are now able to offer our B2B and B2C clients relevant products on our postnl.nl website and on related sites, through one central transactional environment
Arash Azizi, Channel Manager Webshop Post NL
Increased sales
In 2016 online sales increased by 33 %, boasting a 150% increase in average order value. The number of customers of PostNL has increased by as much as 200%. Order processing is fully automatized and thanks to the Single Sign-On, PostNL can continue to roll out its shop-in-shop concepts. By hosting on a very fast cluster platform, the load times have been reduced to 0.8 seconds.
The new Magento 2 platform with one transactional environment has resulted in a unified brand experience that caters to all clients - B2B and B2C- via all relevant channels in- and outside the postnl.nl. The webshop is fully responsive. This enables PostNL to do e-commerce on both owned and no-owned channels while Magento takes care of logistics and other complexities. In a shrinking postal market, PostNL is outperforming its own turnover forecasts and seeing an increase in online transactions. The company is currently moving on towards creating a PWA in order to take their e-commerce to the next level.
Magento experience
The platform has been successfully integrated with the ERP, the back office and entire high-traffic infrastructure. The webshop now seamlessly caters to the needs of 1 mln monthly visitors and processes more than 250.000 orders each year. The transactional platform is not only available on the new integrated postnl.nl website, but also available to integrate on an external platform to make a little part of the Magento experience available on e.g. media channels or marketplaces.
