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Douglas Success Story

Building the leading beauty platform

Project Highlights

Extreme order volume

Reduced Time to launch new shops

Seven Countries Live with more to come

About Douglas

  • Founded in 1910
  • Industry: Retail/Beauty
  • Countries: 26
  • Stores: over 2.000
  • Turnover fiscal year 2021/2022: 3.65 bn €
  • Online revenue share: 33% at the end of 2021/2022 fiscal year

Douglas is the leading premium beauty platform in Europe with headquarters in Düsseldorf, Germany. The continued expansion of the fast-growing e-commerce business is the focus of the #FORWARDBEAUTY.DigitalFirst. strategy program. Thus, in 2019 Douglas made the strategic decision to fully transform its digital landscape.

We partnered with Douglas and SAP in a complete SaaS setup for the public cloud including multiple SAP CX solutions. Douglas is integrating online shops, marketplace and stores into a data-based beauty platform, thus focusing its growth strategy on digital beauty retail.

Ever since the new strategy was announced and Douglas started its transformation journey, sales and earnings continue to grow. In the 2021/2022 fiscal year, Douglas generated sales of €3.65bn in the areas of perfumery, decorative cosmetics, skin and hair care, as well as nutritional supplements and accessories. E‑Commerce sales for the full year make around 1.2 billion euros, which is more than twice as high as pre-COVID level.

We are excited and proud to be a partner of Douglas in their transformation from an omnichannel beauty retailer to the leading digital beauty platform.

Yves Dupont, Director Projects and Engineering, Douglas

I am incredibly proud of the platform we’ve built together. Thanks to its robust and flexible technical foundation, we can easily add features to answer all modern customer’s needs – from social commerce to AI-powered solutions. With NETCONOMY, we truly work as one team. And I believe that is one of the key elements to success.

Challenges

Various target groups and markets

Complex architecture and data exchange process

Old SAP Hybris version in place, no upgradability

No ability to add new SAP commerce features

Various software vendors resulting in longer development times

Long time to set up new shops, no expandability

Loyalty program and online shop technically separated

Strategic question: Continue with a complex, non-upgradable architecture or take time to rebuild the entire digital commerce landscape?

With an ambitious goal to stay the #1 beauty destination in Europe and having the need to address many different target groups, Douglas decided on a strategic step.

 

Project Scope:

  • Reduce time to market new shops
  • Leverage the microservices-driven architecture
  • Enable transformation of the commerce landscape through increased flexibility
  • Enable rollouts in various countries and regions
  • Introduce 1:1 personalization scenarios for various target groups
  • Platform-Strategy with a flexible, scalable technology consisting of important elements suchas Ecommerce, Stores, Loyalty Program and a marketplace interacting seamlessly

Achievements

From technology foundation to measurable business results – this is how we helped Douglas transform into Europe’s leading beauty digital platform.

Mature tech foundation to enable comprehensive business scenarios

  • Scalable eCommerce platform with complex order management processes
  • Multi-language, multi-currency, multi-site platform
  • Comprehensive multi-channel process integration to allow various delivery and pickup scenarios
  • Entire Storefront management based on SmartEdit
  • Fully integrated loyalty program with more than 44m loyalty cardholders
  • Order management service via Distributed Workflow Engine based on Temporal, to ensure scalability and agility, and reduce complexity
  • Designed to scale up to 50k orders per hour

Data engineering and intelligence as integrated platform components

  • Delivery Time Prediction feature allows calculation of accurate delivery times
  • Visual product search based on Google Vision AI

 

Unified omnichannel customer experience

  • Single customer view thanks to the centralized customer identity and consent management system
  • Instant pickup – click and collect service within two hours
  • Enablement of Instant Delivery and Fulfillment from store services

From shop to marketplace

  • Seamlessly integrated marketplace
  • 100 Marketplace SKUs (out of 140 total SKUs)
  • Fully independent product data maintenance by suppliers

Direct impact on business results

  • Increased number of orders and revenue
  • Increased conversion rate and average shopping cart value
  • Increased SEO rankings after the go-live
  • Smooth high seasons such as Black Friday
  • Reduced time to market for core functionalities and new business cases

Dogulas app performance on Black Friday 2022

place ranking in the free app charts on Friday and Saturday

of online orders were made through the app

increase in app downloads compared to previous year

increase in app visits compared to previous year

Tech Stack

  • SAP Commerce Cloud
  • SAP Marketing Cloud
  • SAP Customer Data Cloud
  • SAP Context Driven Services
  • Mirakl
  • Kyma
  • Custom Machine Learning models

The new commerce platform was an essential part of bringing our #ForwardBeauty.DigitalFirst strategy to life. NETCONOMY helped us with state-of-the-art technical guidance and expert advice throughout the entire project. We truly appreciate the commitment and dedication of the NETCONOMY team, as well as mutual trust we have built and relied upon.

Vanessa Stützle

Chief Digital Officer and Member of the Management Board (2021), Douglas

#SAPCommerceCloud #DigitalCommerce #CustomerStory
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