Member Article

MPREIS chooses SAAS AG’s Grocery Commerce Cloud to support new digital storefront

Austrian grocery chain MPREIS is set to become one of the first in Europe to roll-out a localised digital storefront that shows the availability of produce across the entirety of its network of 280 stores.

The company with headquarters in Tyrol, which operates in Austria and Northern Italy, has offered customers an online shopping and delivery service that picks goods from a number of its stores for seven years.

However, the company wanted a digital storefront that showed prices and availability of stock across all of its 280 stores.This omnichannel experience is intended to deliver a consistent and personalised instore and online shopping experience for all customers, support the group’s traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ stores and reduce costs associated with using less effective channels, such as the use of printed promotional material, to reach customers.

To provide the best possible user experience and enable the group to manage its online presence in an agile manner, MPREIS selected SAAS AG’s Grocery Commerce Cloud. SAAS AG was created by former employees of e-commerce software specialist Hybris, which was sold to SAP in 2013.

SAAS’s e-commerce platform uses a headless commerce approach, where backend and frontend aspects of the overall e-commerce set-up are separated. This has allowed MPREIS to work with a variety of specialist agencies, including Austrian web development agency Club Drei, who were responsible for building the digital storefront, and Munich based COBE, who have been responsible for managing user experience across all digital touchpoints.

SAAS’s Grocery Commerce Cloud also consists of an e-commerce backend that is made up of a variety of ‘microservices’ that are connected by APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), making it easier for MPREIS to manage future developments and improvements to customer experience across its e-commerce platform. In total, SAAS AG’s microservices and APIs provide the solution for managing product data, administering content and processing orders.

Ulrich Theilmann, Head of Digital Transformation & eCommerce at MPREIS, said: “Our digital storefront will give customers options and flexibility when it comes to picking products from across our stores. We deliberately chose a headless commerce platform because it provided us with the ability to create an online user experience in an individual and innovative way using a variety of partners.

“SAAS AG impressed us, both with the technical architecture of the solution and with the team’s many years of experience in the online grocery sector.”

Eberhardt Weber, CEO of SAAS AG said: “Combining a headless commerce approach, with the microservice led set-up of our back-end platform will allow the team at MPREIS to develop its online presence in an agile way, with frequent releases and updates that can be rapidly deployed.

“The digital storefront project is already a great achievement for an independent grocery chain and the company now has e-commerce infrastructure in place to support further innovative.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Elizabeth Scammell .