Founded in 2011, Westwing are one of the top design and living premium brands in Europe. With a wide range of over 3,000 partnerships and their own Westwing Collection to choose from, their customers enjoy a unique brand experience with carefully curated products from across 12 countries.
Having built out a sprawling, bespoke eCommerce platform in-house over the previous decade, Westwing decided they needed to move to a best-of-breed solution that could secure the brand’s future and help them to expand into new markets.
With Shopify, Westwing have implemented:
- An adapted version of Shopify Checkout to ensure a seamless migration for customers
- One Shopify store they can easily replicate, enabling them to launch into new markets quickly
- A headless architecture that allowed for a robust backend and a bespoke storefront
Challenge
Having undergone a business transformation from a pure retailer into a brand that also partners with other manufacturers, Westwing were looking to update the technical infrastructure they had used for the past ten years to a solution that would allow them to scale and innovate at a fast pace.
The Westwing team was keen to explore SaaS-based, best-of-breed models that could help the company continue on their growth trajectory by streamlining their entire eCommerce platform. The team took the decision to replace their entire tech stack of software, platforms and systems across the business to make them more efficient and effective. Westwing chose Shopify as the best platform to future-proof their eCommerce business.
Solution
Westwing decided to migrate to Shopify, with work beginning in late 2023. Taking an iterative approach, they spent the first three months laser-focused on building the base level of the platform, followed by developing a rigorous rollout plan. The first market to go live was Portugal in early 2024, which coincided with Westwing moving into the country for the first time. Having initially migrated in three countries, Westwing went live in all twelve markets they operate in by the end of 2024. It was thanks to this extensive planning and activation that the team were able to meet all of their key deadlines.
One of the main reasons that CTO Usama Dar chose Shopify was the ability to combine the range of out-of-the-box solutions built by Shopify and its partners with the ability to customise extensively. Westwing were therefore able to go fully headless – separating the frontend site from the backend operations, building the frontend website to suit the brand’s specific needs, such as their own fonts, layouts and user interfaces. It also enabled the team to control important legacy factors to ensure best-in-class customer experience, such as implementing existing SEO-based URLs for their products, rather than rebuilding the pages afresh.
We decided to move to Shopify as we believe it provides us with the most future-proof way to think about commerce.
Westwing have also been able to tap into Shopify’s extensive app ecosystem to help them leverage the most effective tools for their business, such as Salsify to make their product information management (PIM) easier to navigate. At the same time, the implementation of Algolia helps Westwing to optimise search functionality on the site.
Shopify works well for our needs because it gives us a very API-driven back-end, meaning it fits perfectly with a headless environment.
As a premium brand, Westwing were keen to adopt approaches and solutions bespoke to their situation. For example, they had a strong existing customer base who were used to the previous checkout functionality, so it was important to ensure that that specific aspect of the migration was as seamless as possible. The team decided to implement an adapted form of Shopify Checkout which meant existing customers’ saved data and payment processes would seamlessly and securely move across to the new platform.
Results
Westwing have successfully migrated to Shopify, without interrupting the customer journey, keeping engagement scores high. The design and living brand have been able to roll out to new markets much faster since moving to Shopify. By creating one central store with a Shopify Market setup, they can replicate the key components they need for a local market quickly and easily each time they want to move into a new country.
Westwing’s goal for the future is that every new country they launch in will be natively activated with Shopify to ensure a consistent brand experience for customers in every market. As Westwing is continuing to innovate their customer experience, they are planning to offer pickup locations for purchases in future.
In the future, we are launching new possibilities for our customers like pickup locations, which we can easily plug in and launch thanks to the huge range of apps and infrastructure already available through Shopify.