About Bolsius

Schijndel-based Bolsius is a candle manufacturer for the European market. The company started in 1870 and over the years has developed a wide range of different candles; from grave lights to tea lights, from scented candles to scented sticks. Bolsius candles can be found in garden centres, supermarkets and drugstores. The company employs 900 people across several locations in Europe.

The goal

Bolsius sells candles to retailers and wholesalers. Among other things, these sales are facilitated by the online portal (also called trade portal) where wholesale customers and sales representatives can order candles.

As support for the previous ecommerce platform expired, Bolsius was looking for a new platform on which to run the trade portal. However, there were some hard requirements for this new platform:

The new platform needs to be able to be rigged up quickly; the previous platform was phased out within 3 months. 
The new platform should be flexible; changes should be easy to make. This was not possible in the previous platform.
The new platform should offer the same customisation features as the previous platform, including customer-specific catalogues, sales representatives and a custom login.
The platform should synchronise with Bolsius' ERP (Oracle's JD Edwards), so that the management of the portal is automated and centralised from the ERP as much as possible.

The result

Together with Bolsius, we chose Magento 2 Open source as the new ecommerce platform, because of its stable base and wide scope for making changes. Within Magento 2 we used a combination of our own extensions, custom-made extensions and third-party extensions to set up the complex webshop in a relatively short time.

We have our own clutch converted to export and import XML files in JD Edwards format. This integration periodically updates the customers, products and translations in the web shop and exports orders to the ERP.

A few highlights of the area:

Unique checkout process combining shopping cart and checkout in 1 clear screen. In the checkout, delivery addresses from multiple locations are retrieved and displayed in 1 dropdown and customers can choose a delivery date based on destination country. In addition, customers see whether they have met the customer-specific minimum order quantity and how many pallets are ordered.
Customer-specific catalogue with customer-specific prices and currency, fed from the ERP system.
Customer activation so that customers can create their own trade portal account based on a unique combination of parameters.
Sales representatives can place orders for customers.