Kroschke SIGN Modernises Its E-Commerce Architecture with commercetools

Kroschke SIGN-International is a specialised provider of identification, safety and organisational solutions for industrial and commercial customers. The company primarily serves B2B target groups with extensive product portfolios and individual requirements for procurement and security of supply. Alongside traditional sales channels, digital commerce is playing an increasingly important role in making ordering processes efficient and user-friendly.

Before the project began, Kroschke SIGN-International used an existing e-commerce landscape that had evolved over the years and had to meet different requirements. At the same time, B2B customers’ expectations of convenient ordering processes, customised purchasing environments and seamless integration of their procurement systems were increasing. In order to meet these requirements in the long term, the technical basis was to be modernised and more strongly geared towards modular, flexibly expandable components.

In the project, a new e-commerce architecture had to be developed that can reliably map both the complex B2B requirements and different interface standards. Various customer procurement systems were to be integrated via OCI, cXML and BMEcat connections without impairing the stability of the platform. At the same time, administration, content maintenance and search had to be designed in such a way that large product ranges can be managed efficiently and found easily by users.

The platform was designed so that customers’ procurement systems can be connected via established standards such as OCI, cXML and BMEcat. Both punchout scenarios and catalogue provision play a role here: customers can access the Kroschke product worlds directly from their e-procurement system, while order data is transmitted back to their systems in a structured format.

Using these standards makes it possible to serve different system landscapes on the customer side without having to develop bespoke specialist solutions for each individual connection. This reduces integration effort, increases stability and creates a reliable basis for automated approval and ordering processes in the B2B environment. This turns the commerce stack into the central hub between the shop, catalogue formats and customer-side procurement systems.

The e-commerce solution is embedded in an AWS infrastructure specifically designed to support load distribution and scaling. Computing power and storage resources can be adjusted as needed, for example during seasonal peaks or larger rollouts of new features. Monitoring mechanisms help to identify performance bottlenecks at an early stage and initiate countermeasures.

At the same time, operating in the cloud enables a clear separation of development, test and production environments. Deployments can be carried out in a controlled manner without affecting ongoing business operations. This gives Kroschke SIGN-International a setup that both safeguards day-to-day business and provides scope for continuous further development – from new interfaces through to additional services in the commerce stack.

With Contentful as a headless CMS, content is structured, modelled and maintained independently of the shop front end. Product information, images, notes and service content can be broken down into reusable building blocks that can be delivered selectively across different purchasing environments.

Algolia complements this structure with a high-performance search and filtering logic that quickly searches large product inventories and prioritises relevant results. In addition to traditional search functions, facets, synonyms or individual ranking rules can be used to show users exactly the products that match their needs. Combined, they create a flexible foundation for continuously optimising B2B purchasing experiences.