Grohe: a leading B2B company for tools and fittings
Grohe is a fourth-generation specialist wholesaler in the trade and industry sector in South Tyrol, Italy. Although the company also serves B2C customers, it’s mainly active in the B2B sector. As a B2B company, Grohe pursues an omnichannel strategy with four major sales channels: field service, office service, point of sale and the website. The social media platforms are used for lead generation and customer retention.
Grohe already had two online stores before the company turned to Shopware. The first was launched in 2005 when the company entered ecommerce. In 2012, the company was relaunched with a completely new online store. Both websites were developed in-house due to the specific requirements of their industry.
The home page of the new Grohe online store
Grohe 3.0: A modern online store for the B2B business
As the B2B industry is constantly evolving, Grohe had decided it was time for another relaunch. The company wanted to offer its customers one of the most modern online stores in the industry. The store was also to function as a reference guide with a central knowledge database on all aspects of the tool and hardware range. The aim was to inform their customers, generate more leads and strengthen their position in the industry.
User-friendly image navigation in the categories
To achieve these objectives, Grohe decided to use Shopware 6 as its ecommerce platform. When asked why Shopware in particular, Karl Grohe, Managing Director of Grohe GmbH, replied:
"Because we are impressed by Shopware as a partner for the future. Shopware has a good basic functionality in the B2B sector and we have the impression that this will be further expanded. There are also many functions and ideas from the B2C world that we can learn from. In addition, there’s the growing Shopware community, which from our point of view is very important for a shop system. With the technologies Shopware uses, we have the impression that they’re 'state of the art' and that this will allow us to implement our ideas in the future."
Shopware B2B Suite for every B2B business model
In addition to Shopware 6’s innovative technology, Grohe is also very impressed with the B2B Suite. It allows them to register companies with multiple buyers and thus reduces the workload associated with their daily B2B transactions.
Another helpful function is the ability to create order lists and quickly place items in the shopping cart based on the item number. Furthermore, it enables the company to distribute user rights without any problems. Together with Teamblau, Grohe was also able to expand the display via the Shopware B2B Suite. This way, customers can easily view all sales documents such as quotations, orders, delivery notes and invoices.
Product view with selection options
Karl Grohe sums up his experience: "Shopware was able to fully meet our expectations. We have also recommended the shop system to others several times."
Grohe has a promising future ahead of it
With the new store, Grohe now has a technological basis for the developments they’re aiming for in the coming years. In fact, the company is already working on 70 detail improvements in the frontend and admin. There are also plans to increase the number of products in the online store – from 20,000 to 150,000 items by the end of the year. In addition, Grohe is currently also involved in various experiments in the field of artificial intelligence. The company is partly developing machine learning models itself, which will play a major role in the future of ecommerce.
"We are happy to now have a modern online store in www.groheshop.com that we can build on in the coming years. The course of the project worked very well, and we were also able to learn a lot ourselves and further expand our expertise in ecommerce. We enjoy being involved with innovation and working with partners who are at the forefront of technology."
To the online store
