Globe Technologies - Multisite with E-commerce

Background

The market for power tools is competitive. There are many strong players working creatively with their business development and marketing. Some brands have been around for a long time, are well established and well known. But being large and well known often leads to reduced flexibility and mobility. It opens up for Globe Technologies, who are new to the European market, and also a more flexible organization.

In order to be agile, platforms and tools are needed that help Globe Technologies quickly establish their brands and act when business opportunities present themselves. Equally important is being able to test ideas and markets, without consuming excessively large resources. If it turns out that there is potential, you can scale up and deploy more resources.

A multi-site, several brands

Odd Hill was commissioned to build platforms for two of Globe Technologies' brands in Europe – Greenworks (consumer) and Cramer (professional). In order to quickly get an easy-to-manage and resource-efficient solution, a multi-site was a fairly simple choice. With such a solution, several brands can use the same installation.

For the visitors and Globe Technologies, it feels like two independent sites. Technically, they are instances of a “site template”, where the individual sites share functionality but have individual branding. They share a code base, but look different. Admins and editors log into separate backends, but the interfaces look the same.

The advantage of this is that it will be more time- and cost-effective for Globe Technologies. Instead of managing and paying for two separate sites and installations, you can limit yourself to one. Admittedly, you are somewhat limited in what you can do individually on the individual sites. But in Globe Technologies' case, the conditions for the different brands were so similar that the advantages outweighed them.

Drupal and BigCommerce a strong duo

Developing your own e-commerce solution was never really an option. A ready-made SaaS solution was more in line with Globe Technologies' strategy. The choice fell on BigCommerce and a headless integration with Globe Technologies' multi-site that is built in Drupal.

Headless means integrating with a third-party solution without using its user interface. BigCommerce offers ready-made e-commerce with a store that you can customize with your own logo and colors. In this case, we wanted control over the visual interface and user experience.

BigCommerce has all the major features in place. And Drupal is a framework required to integrate e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce. It is also one of the best and most secure systems for working with content management with a lot of content in multiple languages.

Common features different branding

urrently, the solution is used for Greenworks and Cramer, Globe Technologies' two strongest brands. They share functions without renouncing their branding. This means that features developed on the platform will be available to all brands. At the same time, there is room to take the turns so that the individual brands are displayed visually in accordance with their branding.

Advantages of the solution

• Easy to set up new markets.
• There is a ready-made e-commerce solution that can be used by all brands (websites) on the platform.
• The cost of developing features is shared by several brands. Either les cost per brand or more money for everyone to spend on developing new features.
• Great flexibility for individual visual design and branding. The different websites feel unique.
• The same editorial interface (backend) for all brands.
• Different editor levels that can be tailored market and content specific.
• One platform to maintain and security update instead of several.