Case Study
SCAYLE x Versandhaus Walz:
Zero Downtimes and a 20% Revenue Boost in 6 Months
With four brands under one roof, Versandhaus Walz is one of the leading German lifestyle retailers for parents, babies, and people in need of health care supplies. So naturally, family and tradition are a big part of the enterprise retailer’s core values. However, never at the expense of real progress.
On the contrary: At its headquarters in Bad Waldsee, nestled between Ulm and Lake Constance, Walz continues to be at the forefront of implementing the latest eCommerce and logistics solutions to sustainability drive its multi-brand strategy forward.
As part of that, the retailer decided to rid itself of the shackles of legacy eCom tech and partner up with SCAYLE and diva-e in pursuit of a growth-enabling eCommerce architecture that would go the distance.
About Versandhaus Walz
Founded in 1952 by Alfons Walz, Versandhaus Walz was the first specialist mail-order company for expectant mothers and young parents in Germany. Now, the enterprise’s four retail brands distribute products in five countries, including the DACH (Germany-Austria-Switzerland) region, Belgium and the Netherlands. Every day, approximately 1,000 employees work on processing and shipping a massive 20,000 orders.
The Challenges:
1. Challenge: No Room for Growth
Agility is essential for a growing multi-brand retailer like Versandhaus Walz. Yet, the previous shop system struggled to keep up with the enterprise’s ambitious growth plans. Due to the tightly coupled front- and backend, the monolithic platform had to be layered with countless custom logics over time, suffocating any current and future growth opportunities.
“[The platform] was super error-prone and unstable – we constantly ran into issues that made it hard to keep things running smoothly,” says Julia Lugk, Online Shop Development Lead at Walz. “Developing new features became really difficult – and in the end we were completely blocked.”
Philip Neumann, Head of eCommerce at Walz, saw the issues early on: “Admittedly, we didn’t make an ideal choice back then – the platform had already passed its peak. Eventually, we just couldn’t continue working with it.” As a result, the team was stuck in endlessly long test and deployment cycles.
The Solution: A Future-Savvy eCom Infrastructure Courtesy of diva-e and SCAYLE
On Black Friday 2023, Walz’s eCommerce struggles hit a boiling point when the platform crashed during prime time. It became apparent that a migration was the only way forward. In collaboration with diva-e, Julia Lugk and her team took to analysing their current system architecture and processes to determine what the new platform should bring to the table. On top of the list: Meet the complex demands of a multi-brand enterprise retailer. And SCAYLE quickly became a top contender.
“At the basis of our criteria was to understand that we’re not a tech company but a retailer. This means our focus needs to be selling products. That’s why it was important to us that distribution and sales would be at the forefront of our operations and that we could solve a multitude of things on a configurative level instead of wasting time on endless development cycles.”
Philip Neumann, Head of eCommerce at Walz
SCAYLE’s intuitive user panel, which enables commerce teams to configure and manage individual shop settings on their own, in particular, hit the mark. “It’s super self-explanatory – and my team can just maintain things independently,” says Julia Lugk.
From Zero to Hero in Just Six Months With diva-e
During the pre-migration phase, diva-e and Versandhaus Walz mapped out the retailer’s new, future-ready eCommerce infrastructure. The migration then kicked off in April 2023 – with a rather ambitious goal in mind: having all 14 shops live and kicking by Black Friday of the same year.
In the process, SCAYLE was supplying and configuring the system architecture as well as integrating out-of-the-box solutions like the SCAYLE Checkout. Meanwhile, diva-e took care of the frontend and connectors.
“The migration was truly a textbook process, thanks to the people involved, both at SCAYLE and diva-e. Our last shop migration took a little more than two years, whereas this one we completed in just over six short months – and it was smooth throughout.”
Philip Neumann, Head of eCommerce at Walz
The Result: Enterprise Complexity Turned into Growth
After just four months, babywalz Austria went live as the first of 14 online shops. The remaining stores followed soon after, successfully completing the migration in time for Black Week 2023. The new flexible, scalable tech stack handled Walz’s biggest annual traffic surge with ease. In fact, the retailer managed to double its growth compared to the overall market.
Moreover, Walz’s commerce teams now have the freedom to configure most day-to-day shop processes internally. Lengthy development cycles to add new features are also a thing of the past. “These are really big advantages,” says Philip Neumann. “The platform is just incredibly, incredibly fast.”
Jochen Binder, Head of Backend and Data Solutions at diva-e agrees: “By migrating to an entirely new tech stack in six months we accomplished something that sounds impossible to many. From a high-energy kick-off in Bad Waldsee to the final go-live: The highly motivated teams at Versandhaus Walz, SCAYLE, and diva-e turned this into true high-performance team effort.”
“By migrating to an entirely new tech stack in six months we accomplished something that sounds impossible to many. From a high-energy kick-off in Bad Waldsee to the final go-live: The highly motivated teams at Versandhaus Walz, SCAYLE, and diva-e turned this into true high-performance team effort.”
Jochen Binder, Head of Backend and Data Solutions at diva-e
2. Challenge: Multi-Brand Distinction
The challenges for an enterprise retailer with four different brands are complex. Especially if they are as different as in the case of Versandhaus Walz. “With babywalz we run a multi-channel business that has a big digital footprint. However, its brick-and-mortar stores also need to be connected to the online shop and vice versa. This throws up a huge number of multi-channel tasks, like ‘Click & Reserve’, that need to be managed,” say Philip Neumann.
Die Modernen Hausfrau, on the other hand, is still primarily print catalogue-driven, which comes with its own set of challenges. “Customers still receive their catalogues in the mail but then order online. This means, the online experience needs to match the catalogue experience as closely as possible.”
With the monolithic architecture of the previous system, tailoring the different frontends to different brand requirements was nearly impossible. “It was an extremely painful process,” admits Philip Neumann.
“It was hardly possible to fulfill individual requests for any of the brands. If one wanted something extra, we had to do it for all of them – and sometimes hide certain functionalities, which made the process incredibly complex and error-heavy.”
Julia Lugk, Online Shop Development Lead at Walz
The Solution: Personalization on All Front(end)s
Since migrating to SCAYLE, tailoring front- and backend features to the enterprise’s four brands has become a breeze. The same counts for introducing new brands into their ecosystem as recently confirmed by their latest acquisition, babymarkt. “SCAYLE made it incredibly easy to set up the new shop,” says Julia Lugk.
To fully embed the brand into current system architecture, the team decided to pull up a brand new shop – complete with Walz’s business requirements. “We had a very ambitious timeline. From the start of the project to the go-live with our MVP we had about ten weeks. Here as well everything worked out wonderfully thanks to diva-e and SCAYLE. We even finished ahead of schedule,” says Philip Neumann.
The Result: Tailored Experiences at the Click of a Button
With SCAYLE’s modular approach, Versandhaus Walz can now tailor their shopping experiences to each individual brand. “The architecture is a big driver for us. We’re not forced to wait for backend development anymore but instead can make the changes we want ourselves in the frontend. The fact that we can solve so many things on a configurative level without calling on additional developer support is a big help,” says Philip Neumann.
This is also the case when it comes to individual shop components, such as promotions and the checkout. “[The platform] has an incredibly stable checkout that we simply do not have to worry about at all, which was one of our main criterias.”
On top of that, Versanhaus Walz can now set up and send out promotions in just a few clicks. “Ideally, it takes less than an hour from decision to implementation.”
3. Challenge: Peak-Hour Stability
Traffic peaks in retail are just part of business – even outside of the holiday sales season. Yet, Black Friday remains one of the most crucial days in the retail calendar. “For our customers, especially at babywalz, Black Friday has become extremely important – and it’s becoming more relevant with each year,” says Philip Neumann. “You can already feel it in October: people suddenly start purchasing less because they’re waiting to get better deals in November.”
As a result, Black Friday sales often determine the outcome of the entire financial year for many retailers, Walz included. That’s why downtimes in these critical moments are a no-go. “In the past, we experienced more than just a few hiccups with our bounce times. Especially during prime time when it really hurts,” says Philip Neumann. That’s why stability was especially important during the platform selection process.
The Solution: A Platform That Scales When It Matters
With an uptime of 99.99%, SCAYLE’s lighting-fast APIs enable Versandhaus Walz’s retail brands to meet customer expectations – regardless of how busy it gets. The platform scales automatically based on demand – and without compromising performance.
“2023 was the first year we ran our shops on SCAYLE and it ended up being our first Black Friday without outages or downtimes. Everything just ran super smoothly. We didn’t notice a thing.”
Julia Lugk, Online Shop Development Lead at Walz
The Result: A 20% Increase in Turnover – Zero Downtime
The results were instant: On Black Friday itself, Versandhaus Walz increased its turnover by a whopping 20%. On top of that, the overall conversion rate increased by 9% since replatforming. “Since moving to SCAYLE we managed to reach heights that we’d simply never seen before in this shape and form,” says Philip Neumann.
They credit both, powerful platform performance and the ability to implement changes in virtually no time, for this success.
“What we used to do in 3-week release cycles we can now do in one day because SCAYLE gives us the freedom to focus on what matters.”
Philip Neumann, Head of eCommerce at Walz
Overall Results
Migrating to SCAYLE fully transformed Versandhaus Walz’s eCommerce landscape. Not only have their internal shop development processes become faster, they also gained the ability to configure more store settings and features independently.
“For instance, it’s incredibly easy to set up, implement, and test new promotions,” says Philip Neumann. “Generally speaking, both shop performance and processes are significantly better and faster, which also led to us needing fewer resources as a result.”
“Whenever we need something, we usually get it delivered super quickly. There is always someone who listens, understands what we need, and we always manage to find good solutions together – those are signs of a very strong partnership.”
Future Plans
Next it’s all about continuing to power Versandhaus Walz’s ambitious growth plans. Part of that will be building out different feature sets for each one of the individual retail brands. Moreover, the enterprise retailer is looking to drive its omnichannel strategy forward.“For babywalz and customers of Die Moderne Hausfrau, ‘online-to-offline’ is front and centre. For walzvital, we plan to move further away from print catalogues and become the online health supply store. It’s going to be an exciting journey,” says Philip Neumann.