Comment Toyota a connecté 400 concessionnaires en 4 mois

Toyota Germany: Conquering the country's online car industry

Founded in Japan, Toyota is the world's largest automobile company. It has sold 11.2 million vehicles world-wide and has an annual turnover of around 186bn euros globally.

In 1971, Toyota entered the German market. Today, it is one of the country's best-selling car brands. It sold 75,199 cars in Germany in 2023 alone and is expected to reach 1.534 billion dollars in 2024.

The challenges

Although Toyota has been in the German market since 1971, it didn't have an ecommerce platform for the country or Europe until recently. As a result, its customers turned to eBay to buy new and used Toyota cars.

To solve this problem, Toyota decided to build an online shop in Germany, which would later be expanded to serve European customers. The new ecommerce shop would serve as a central hub where customers could buy different Toyota models. It should also offer accessories and spare parts online from official dealers or Toyota itself.

Why Shopware 6?

Toyota had high expectations for its first online shop in Europe. For example, the company wanted to offer a variety of features to give customers a great shopping experience. It also had high standards for the quality of its product images. In addition, Toyota wanted to automate all processes to simplify communication with over 400 retailers on the platform. Given the size of the company and the complexity of its data, these were not easy tasks.

To meet these challenges, Toyota needed a robust, state-of-the-art ecommerce system. To this end, the company evaluated a number of ecommerce solutions based on the following criteria: flexibility, customization, ecosystem, stability, trust and cost. Ultimately, Shopware 6 came out on top, beating out SAP Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce.

Shopware 6 as the basis for Toyota's first online shop in Europe

Shopware 6 is a well-known German ecommerce solution. The shop system is equipped with many useful and innovative features. Among others, Toyota uses the following Shopware functions

• Flow Builder - to define and automate individual business processes in one place, without using any code.

• Rule Builder - for setting up highly customized business processes.

• CMS and Experience Worlds - to create the storefront of the online shop.

• Promotional features - to manage discounts and campaigns in the online store.

The Future

Toyota considers the current state of the project to be an MVP. But the launch of the online shop is just the beginning of its plans to dominate Europe. In the future, the company plans to expand its product range and improve product data. It will also work on cross-selling and up-selling its products. Furthermore, Toyota wants to internationalize its online shop, which means that it will be available in several languages.

Michael Schödder, Digital Project IT-Consultant at Toyota Germany is satisfied with the results of the project: “The complexity of the data, the variety of functions and the high quality requirements for the product images presented us with major challenges, but with creative solutions and a strong partnership, we have mastered these and created an online shop that exceeds expectations”.