Challenge

Vision Healthcare consists of 75 different brands, mainly in vitamins and health products, being sold in over 45 countries. They once built their entire ecommerce environment themselves, and they also tried buying some software components (Nop Commerce for Carts & Orders, a CMS, etc.), but ultimately, after many trials with open source and other experiments, they decided to start their journey to scalable architecture through a composable approach, beginning with a migration to commercetools in 2022.

Vision Healthcare relied on an open-source solution built in-house that required time-consuming customizations to address its goals and needs. As the company also hosted the platform on an on-premise solution, scaling digital commerce uptime to meet the growing customer demand became increasingly difficult. With a staggering growth of up to 25,000 transactions per day, Vision Healthcare needed a flexible solution to scale eCommerce performance and power omnichannel interactions while keeping a high level of control across all of its brands

Strategy

Vision Healthcare took a staggered approach to migration, which they initatied by replacing their Cart & Orders functionality in only 4 months.

Method

After many experimentations with other technological approaches (on-prem, open-source, etc.), Vision Healthcare found that a best-of-breed MACH-based composable approach was the right choice for scaling their ecommerce operations and to unify the tech stack across all brands. Vision Healthcare is utilizing a best-of-breed search engine from Algolia, payments processing through Adyen, all powered by Google Cloud and commercetools.

For Vision Healthcare, the best-of-breed approach is a cornerstone of its strategy, as it enables the company to leverage the building blocks that best fit its requirements and create a customized commerce ecosystem. For example, during the replatforming process, the company opted for a CMS system that didn’t work well within its tech stack. The best-of-breed approach made it possible to swap the CMS with another provider seamlessly, further proving that composable was the right solution for the company.

During the four-month implementation from signature to production, Vision Healthcare integrated independent components forming a stack built on performant GraphQL, including commercetools Composable Commerce, as well as Hygraph for CMS, Adyen for payments, Algolia for search and Next.js for frontend. Furthermore, the company replaced its on-premise IT infrastructure with cloud-native architecture powered by Google Cloud.