When the world’s largest beauty company sells to pharmacies, it is not ecommerce in the sense a consumer understands it. A pharmacy does not browse the range and add whatever it fancies to the basket. It has a contract: specific products, specific prices, specific terms. And the pharmacy in the neighbouring country has a different contract.
That is exactly what makes this demanding. The store has to show every customer a different store, and no customer may ever see another’s prices. In four countries at once.
All prices come from SAP
We did not build pricing logic into the ecommerce store. That would have meant the same contract data living in two places and, sooner or later, drifting apart.
Instead, SAP is the single source of truth. The ecommerce store fetches prices and availability from it, and the pharmacy sees the same price that is written in its contract.
Thanks to the SAP integration, each pharmacy sees only its own products and its own prices. User-specific views, restricted product visibility and the pricing logic work on the same principle in both the L'Oréal Dermatological Beauty and the SkinCeuticals ordering channels.
“The website is designed to meet the needs of the Finnish market and offer L’Oréal pharmacy customers a smooth and efficient way to order products.”
Four countries, one installation
L'Oréal Nordics operates in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. That is why the store was built to expand from the start: all countries and brands run on the same platform, and opening a new country or brand is a rollout, not a new implementation project.
The work began with the LDBNordics site designed for the Finnish market. Similar sites are now being built on the same foundation for the SkinCeuticals brand in all Nordic countries and for the Danish pharmacy trade. One installation also means one system to maintain: updates and fixes are made once and are in use in every country.
New countries are easy to add without a technical project
From the very start, the platform was built so that launching a new brand or country is a rollout, not a new implementation project.
