VTEX Romania, strategic partnership with the German retailer OBI

VTEX Romania, which is a branch of the VTEX company (NYSE: VTEX), an enterprise digital commerce platform with which brands and retailers manage their global commerce operations, announced yesterday the attraction of the German company OBI in its client portfolio, one of the main multinational retailers in the Do It Yourself (DIY) segment, for which he prepared a new online platform developed for the DIY business. Taking advantage of the VTEX commerce platform, OBI integrated its e-commerce channels for its 349 physical stores in Germany, as well as third-party sellers, into a single transactional platform. This integration expands the German retailer's product offering and provides customers with a shopping experience tailored to their needs by integrating product delivery and pickup options. With nationwide integrated brick-and-mortar stores, customers can conveniently pick up online orders within just two hours of placing them, and the German retailer will see an increase in turnover.

The implementation of the project lasted approximately 18 months, being carried out by a team of 160 people from 7 countries, the entire process being coordinated by the VTEX Romania team, which is responsible for the Central and Eastern Europe region.

Cătălin Vlădescu, Vice President of Growth CEE&Germany within the VTEX company, said: "In terms of negotiation, it was a logistical challenge. The negotiation lasted 8 months and we had a specially assigned team, led by the office in Romania. During this period, I held somewhere around 10-15 workshops, meetings at the client's headquarters. OBI wanted to connect all its customer interaction points. We are talking about mobile applications, consulting centers, online stores, being 10 in different countries, and physical stores at what is called an internal transactional platform. The platform owned by OBI was 14 years old, with a monolithic solution, very difficult to ensure maintenance and updating, which attracted low agility to achieve business objectives. That's why they turned to VTEX to create a modern, multichannel marketing platform that integrates with other systems. Through this platform, OBI wants to increase its assortment in the e-commerce area, which will lead to a higher turnover, but which will not burden the operational, storage area".

The German DIY retailer OBI has 645 stores in Europe, is present in 10 countries and had revenues of 8.2 billion euros in 2023. In addition to the trading function, the new platform offers OBI people the ability to more easily integrate service providers through "plug&play" connectivity, as well as their own marketplace.

One of the specific options that VTEX has implemented for the German DIY business is related to the logistics area and offers the possibility to show customers the delivery time for different products in the shopping cart, when it comes to different periods for some products , which is in the warehouses of several suppliers of the German concern.

Regarding the new platform, according to a press release sent by VTEX Romania, Tim Engler, Senior Vice President, responsible for IT within the OBI group, said: "We want to offer our customers a unified experience through sales channels and partners in the ecosystem, and the technology, the basis of our platform, must reflect this directly. The scalable VTEX platform has allowed us to be closer to our innovative potential, streamline our operations and adapt more quickly to changing market demands. By migrating to VTEX, we replaced our digital commerce platform, launched more than 10 years ago, with a modern one that gives us strategic marketplace capabilities and opens up our ecosystem to third-party sellers. At the same time, we have seen a significant increase in our team's agility and ability to respond to customer requests and market needs. The development and implementation cycle on the VTEX platform is significantly shorter compared to our previous monolithic solution, which gives us great confidence for a rapid international rollout and implementation of new functionality."

According to the quoted source, since migrating to the VTEX platform, German company OBI has seen a better experience for its customers and development teams, with significant improvements that include:

- Unified management of physical stores and online sales channels: 350 independent accounts connected to a single central account.

- Smooth traffic growth: Traffic to the VTEX platform was gradually increased in a controlled manner from 1% to 100% during launch.

- Greater agility: OBI development teams can independently build, test, and deploy new modules and functionality that add value to end users.

- Scalability: The VTEX platform will serve as the basis for rapid scaling in different countries.

Santiago Naranjo, Chief Revenue Officer of VTEX, states: "Innovation is a priority at VTEX and we listen carefully to the needs of companies, development teams and end users. This allows us to anticipate the demands coming from retailers like OBI and become a trusted partner for them by offering a complete commerce solution. Our digital commerce infrastructure powers profitable growth for 2,600 B2C and B2B companies in 43 countries around the world, and we're excited that OBI has joined an ecosystem shaping the future of commerce."

The representatives of VTEX Romania specified that, in addition to the home market of Germany, OBI is present in nine other European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Last year, the German company registered 40,000 employees, revenues of 8.2 billion euros and 21 million monthly visitors to the e-commerce store.

By partnering with VTEX, OBI joins a select portfolio of clients including Auchan, Carrefour, Colgate, Motorola, Sony, Stanley Black & Decker and Whirlpool.