A B2B e-commerce platform for the fashion industry

One of our clients, a major Italian Group operating in the apparel, footwear and accessories sector, expressed the need to modernize its wholesale sales processes through the design of a new platform capable of integrating all sales channels in the organization, greatly simplifying its operations.

The platform also needs to enable the planning of real sales campaigns, guide the user to quick navigation of the product catalog, and differentiate visibility by users and roles.

The Group operates in the field of sports and leisure clothing, footwear and accessories, with well-known brands recognized in the domestic and international markets.

The Group’s business is to develop the value of brands and disseminate related products through a global network of licensee and independent companies.

The context

B2B (business-to-business)e-commerce involves all those logics that revolve around orders placed online between companies. B2B wholesale (wholesale) sales models are adopted in many industries, including retail, catering, construction, etc….

Historically, the B2B wholesale process followed by the company involved the use of telephone, e-mail or order forms with preconfigured spreadsheets.

To date, however, through a single platform allows wholesalers to display their products more easily and makes asmooth shopping experience possible.

The platform

When asked to develop a solution that could simplify different online sales flows, we responded by creating a B2B e-commerce platform that allows the unification in one tool of all business processes related to the wholesale sale of multi-store products.

Sales channels are differentiated by payment method (purchase or account), by access to outlet products, and by user type. All configurable on the same platform with the help of a back-office administration.

The strategy

Our development project focused on 4 key points:

‍Realizea comprehensive and intuitive platform that can ensure system scalability and make the shopping experience simple and immediate;‍

Apply an agile, user-centered methodology that would allow us to best delineate the context and define needs or functionality that the product needs to deliver;‍

Design the solution, test it, and modify it in a continuous iterative process that ensures the design has a winning end result;‍

Working side by side with the Product Owner, external to our organization, to enable a constructive exchange between technicians and analysts while maintaining a focus on everything that increases value in a platform.

Design Process and Technologies

Domain Driven Design is the approach identified in the analysis phase by keeping the primary focus on the domains of the entities that come into play and their logic.

The application of DDD is suitable for all development activities where domain learning takes place in steps and where you have complex business logic or one that tends to evolve over time.

The development framework identified to provide a suitable structure for implementing DDD-based software is ABP framework. Having identified a set of bounded contexts, it was possible to structure the solution architecture in microservices.

The hosting chosen for the platform is Microsoft Azure in order to have greater scalability over the life of the platform as well as an advanced level of monitoring to safeguard its health.

Finally, Azure DevOps Server was instead used for version control, reporting, technical and functional documentation, project management, automated builds, testing, and release management capabilities.