eCommerce with Pimcore

With Pimcore, you can significantly increase your sales and offer your customers fascinating, customized shopping experiences in real time. Pimcore offers a comprehensive set of tools and functionalities to develop B2B, B2C and B2B2C e-commerce applications in an agile way. With ease, Pimcore overcomes challenges such as complex pricing and product structures, sophisticated availability calculation, agile projects with changing requirements, customization of check-outs, numerous catalogs, currencies, price lists and product views, as well as multiple front-end applications and supports flexible promotions.

Pimcore is a commerce framework, which means it is not an out-of-the-box online store. Instead, it provides the building blocks for creating a digital commerce platform customized for the client. This allows us to develop the e-commerce system along your needs while leveraging the flexibility and scalability of the platform. Pimcore is an e-commerce framework for building enterprise-class e-commerce sites, comparable to Adobe Commerce, Spryker and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Pimcore is based on Symfony, which is the same technology used by many of the world's largest websites. This allows you to take advantage of the Symfony ecosystem and build your commerce site with technology used by many other companies.

Pimcore is an integrated system that offers dedicated modules each for Content Management (CMS), Product Information Management (PIM), Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Customer Data Management (CDP). This eliminates many interfaces that would be necessary according to the best-of-breed approach to connect software from different vendors. Based on the Pimcore framework, it is therefore possible to easily combine content and commerce to create a personalized customer experience.

Thanks to extensive APIs and not least with the help of the Blackbit Data Director, CRM and ERP systems can be connected easily. Thanks to these APIs, the Pimcore Digital Commerce Framework is highly future-proof and also forms a solid basis for headless commerce.

Small businesses use Pimcore as a PIM system together with a store such as Shopware, BigCommerce or Shopify as a front end. This combination of store and PIM enables a fast time-to-market and a budget-friendly entry into digital commerce. Because Pimcore is available in a Community Edition, you can use it for free. Especially if you as a B2C provider don't need to digitally map individual processes like many B2B companies, but want to differentiate yourself through great content and detailed product information, you should take advantage of the convenient, API-driven update of your product information with Pimcore.

CoreShop is directly integrated with the Pimcore platform, leveraging the extensive capabilities of the software. CoreShop consists of a series of bundles that, installed individually or in aggregate, add commerce functionality to Pimcore. Because the scope of capabilities is greater than those brought by Pimcore's own e-commerce framework, development times are shortened. Implementing CoreShop typically takes half the time of other solutions that use Pimcore. Below we show you two real-world examples:

Pimcore is used by large and small businesses across all eCommerce industries. Smaller companies maintain product information in Pimcore and route it out to store software. Larger companies consolidate their tech stack into an integrated platform using the Pimcore framework. As a Pimcore agency and e-commerce specialist, Blackbit has extensive expertise in a wide variety of digital commerce scenarios.

NEXOPART is a joint venture founded in 2023 by Haver & Boecker oHG from Oelde (Westphalia) and Hosokawa Alpine AG from Augsburg. NEXOPART combines more than 80 years of experience in the manufacture and production of test sieves from Haver & Boecker and more than 60 years of efficient air-jet screening from Hosokawa Alpine.

As a new brand in the field of particle analysis, a company presentation and a web store were to be realized with the launch of the new website. NEXOPART chose Pimcore to combine commerce and content on one integrated platform. This is because simplicity in the form of short paths from content to ordering options correspond to the service concept of the new company. Pimcore meets the standard requirements of a B2B store, and the integrated Product Information Management facilitates the maintenance of the 10,000 articles. The website is responsive and multilingual. An intelligent search function helps customers quickly find the products and information they need.

A special challenge was the interface to the SAP ERP system, which is used to calculate prices and availability and to activate users for the web store. In the process, customer companies can be assigned different users with different rights. 

horizont group gmbh is a medium-sized group of companies with its headquarters in Korbach (Kassel/Marburg/Paderborn region) and further locations in England, France, Poland and Slovenia. The core competence lies in the development, production and distribution of mobile safety products for road traffic and for high-quality pasture fencing and animal husbandry products. With over 50 patents, the group is one of the technological drivers in both industries.

The project involved the launch of six websites, including one main site and five sub-sites, each covering different business areas. The challenges were many and included implementing B2B and B2C stores, integrating ERP systems, managing multiple currencies, and linking editorial content with e-commerce.

Each of the six sites had specific requirements and target audiences. The main site (horizont.com) is a corporate website based on the Pimcore CMS. For the Animal Care (animalcare.horizont.com) and Traffic Safety (trafficsafety.horizont.com) business units, B2B stores with real-time query of customer-specific prices and B2C stores with different pricing rules and currencies were implemented in each case. The Industrial Customer website (industrialcustomer.horizont.com) is limited to presenting the business unit's service portfolio clearly on the Internet using the integrated CMS.

A particular challenge was to dynamically assign all products located in the central Product Information Management to the respective sites, taking into account different pricing systems, conditions and dependencies such as product recommendations. For this purpose, several categorization structures were implemented to organize products according to categories and target groups.

The launch of the horizont websites was a complex, yet successful project that presented a number of technical and business challenges. Implementing multi-domain structures, integrating ERP systems, and linking editorial content with e-commerce are just a few of the innovative solutions implemented as part of this project. The flexibility and scalability of the technologies used make it possible to meet the specific needs of each business unit, while the centralized management of the sites ensures efficiency and consistency. The project serves as an excellent example of the successful implementation of a multi-domain project with different sites and correspondingly complex requirements.

Flexibility: Great flexibility allows customization of e-commerce platforms to meet specific business needs. 

Open source: As an open source platform, users benefit from an active developer community that is constantly adding new features and improvements.

Complexity: Pimcore can be complex due to its extensive features and customization capabilities. Companies may need specialized developers to realize the full potential of the platform.

Integration: CoreShop is directly integrated with the Pimcore platform, enabling seamless functionality and data consistency.

Extensibility: CoreShop offers a wide range of extensions and enhancements that make it ideal for complex solutions.

Dependency: Since CoreShop is directly integrated with Pimcore, its functionalities depend heavily on Pimcore. If there are problems with Pimcore, it may affect CoreShop as well.