Steadily deploying a new e‑commerce platform across Europe, the office supplies merchant has grown its online Viking Direct brand’s B2B sales to more than 60% of total sales.

Office Depot Europe has been through several changes in recent years—including an aborted acquisition attempt by rival Staples Inc. in 2016, followed by its completed acquisition early this year by investment firm Aurelius Group.

But even with all the upheaval, one thing that has remained constant is steady growth in e-commerce sales on Office Depot Europe’s Viking Direct brand, which sells office supplies directly to businesses as well as consumers in several European markets.

“E-commerce has been really important to us,” Jonathan Newman, vice president of e-commerce for Office Depot Europe, said at a conference yesterday. He noted that the company launched its first e-commerce site in 1999, but over the following years realized it had built a “technology house of cards” with more than two dozen websites with separate software codes, making it difficult to manage website content and features across all of its markets.

In late 2014, the company decided to renew its e-commerce technology and strategy. Working with digital commerce consultants Tacit Knowledge and the SAP Technical Services unit of business software provider SAP SE, it launched a new e-commerce platform on SAP Hybris technology, Newman said at the SAP Hybris Live conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Don’t think you’re so unique that you can’t use off-the-shelf code.
Roy Egas, I.T. project team manager for e-commerce sites
Office Depot Europe

The office supplies company launched the initial phase of the new platform for its Austria site at VikingDirekt.at. It has followed since then with relaunches of its Viking Direct sites for Germany, Ireland and, just last week, Netherlands.

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With its new sites able to process larger volumes of orders more efficiently, while providing improved online content and features like better site navigation, Viking Direct’s online sales account for more than 60% of the brand’s total sales so far this year, up from about 22% in 2009, Roy Egas, Office Depot Europe’s I.T. project team manager for its e-commerce sites, said during a separate presentation at the SAP Hybris conference.

Office Depot Europe is proceeding to re-launch the rest of its Viking Direct sites on the new e-commerce platform, and eventually will add to the same platform the company’s 14 Office Depot sites across Europe. Egas didn’t provide a timeline for the full deployment process, but noted that the Office Depot sites, such as the United Kingdom’s OfficeDepot.co.uk, will require a more elaborate deployment to accommodate the higher degree of complexity of handling Office Depot’s contract customers. Serving contract customers involves such things as customized content, pricing and buyer-authorization features.

Egas said Office Depot Europe decided on the SAP Hybris platform after considering others because of its ability to scale up to meet growing volumes of transactions while also offering a high degree of flexibility in designing e-commerce sites.

When asked what he might have done differently during the deployment, Egas said he learned after the first site relaunch that it was better to keep a version of the old site running alongside the new site. That way you can migrate some customers to the new site and address any technical issues that arise before migrating all customers to it, he said.

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He also advised his audience to refrain from taking on more work than necessary in building custom-coded applications, and instead consider the “off-the-shelf” software that comes with their platform. “Don’t think you’re so unique that you can’t use off-the-shelf code,” he advised.

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