Landgard: Cultivating a unified customer experience with a digital twin of its specialized trade for flowers and plants
Explore Landgard’s journey with SAP Commerce Cloud
A leading marketing producer cooperative for flowers, plants, fruits, and vegetables, Landgard wanted to unify its different formats to offer a consistent shopping experience. The SAP Commerce Cloud solution helped it digitalize its formats, including its order days, product markets, and services. The “myLandgard” platform now delivers improved customer engagement.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Agribusiness | Straelen-Herongen, Germany | 2,600 employees | Medienwerft GmbH, part of FIS Information Systems and Consulting GmbH |
products published in myLandgard.
B2B customers using myLandgard and Ordertage.
Lead Product Owner e-Commerce, Landgard Service GmbH
Creating the digital twin for its specialized trade in the area of flowers and plants
From its 29 cash-and-carry stores and by distribution, Landgard supplies a wide variety of potted plants, cut flowers, floristry and horticultural supplies, fruits, and vegetables, and decorative items to purchasing organizations 365 days a year. These purchasing organizations include specialist international wholesalers and retailers (chain stores), florists, and garden centers throughout Germany and Austria. Landgard also holds trade fairs and exhibitions, such as the twice yearly “Ordertage” (ordering days summit) or further order days for customers and logistics partners. These events showcase a subset of the assortment, completed with floristry products, nursery articles for purchase, as well as Italian products and fruit, bonsai, and conifer trees.
The company’s approach to e-commerce grew organically and had been very fragmented, with five different web shops in the area of flowers and plants. Consequently, the company was missing out on the benefits and synergies that could be achieved through interconnection and harmonized back-end processes. Apart from the technical challenges, the customer experience was inconsistent, redundant, and cumbersome due to factors such as multiple logins, the lack of a full overview of assortment, and different checkout processes.
The heterogenous B2B landscape and its back ends prevented Landgard from applying multichannel approaches. To establish a state-of-the art customer experience, Landgard created a new vision, mission, and road map for its e-commerce business, aiming to establish an e-commerce platform that would become the digital twin of the entire specialized trade business through combining and centralizing all Landgard formats in one digital contact point.
Enhancing the shopping experience with one central e-commerce platform
As the starting point of its e-commerce road map, Landgard conducted an architecture project to examine its IT capabilities and the type of systems it needed to deliver the full scale of the e-commerce process map. By leveraging a best-practice, template approach, Landgard was able to apply one (template) web shop initially and copy to other shops and formats.
The SAP Commerce Cloud solution delivered the capabilities to develop and digitalize the different Landgard formats, such as the events and specific customer services. Using SAP Commerce Cloud with its composable storefront, the company developed the new myLandgard platform, piloting the potted plants product area. When restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic halted its events, Landgard extended best practice from the platform, copying the existing myLandgard base store and setting up a new web shop to enable a fully digital format. Based on this experience during the pandemic, Landgard enabled the order days to run as hybrid events, where customers can decide whether they want to attend physically, digitally, or both.
Even the shopping experience within the physical event has changed with the new technology. Customers can now log in to the web shop on their mobile device, scan QR codes on the plant labels, and add the desired volume to the shopping cart. This self-service QR picking means that customers no longer use paper forms to place their orders, resulting in an enhanced shopping experience. The possibility of online viewing of photographs of actual plants allows customers to select different varieties, choosing on the basis of shape or color, and to indicate their preferences in their cart. They can determine their own pick-up and delivery preferences, choosing to have purchases delivered to a nominated address or collected from a cash-and-carry store. And they can include comments for the attention of delivery drivers or other workers.
Customers can also directly reach out to their dedicated key account manager. These managers have the ability to log into the platform on behalf of the customer and simulate an online order that is fully traceable. Instead of delivering the note and invoice by e-mail, these documents are conveniently stored in the order history. This could serve as an initial step toward integrating these customers into the web shop. Shifting to online documents not only cuts down on paperwork but also allows the account managers to concentrate more on sales-centric activities. This initiative is yet another move toward more-efficient business processes and convenience for customers.
Synchronizing the customer experience for digital and in-store purchasing
Implementing SAP Commerce Cloud allowed Landgard to digitalize its business processes and create completely new customer services. With the myLandgard platform, products are presented professionally, offering more information and convenience. The hybrid nature of the events allows customers to either shop at the physical venues or purchase products online, enabling the same experience in both the offline and digital formats.
The new platform has reenergized customer subscriptions for Landgard. Many customers in the previous online shop were idle, with only a fraction of them actively buying. The number of engaged customers is constantly growing because the platform is more user-friendly and offers several digital services. In addition, customers from the cash-and-carry stores who never used the web shop are now registering and purchasing on myLandgard as well. A positive side effect is that the company has also seen growth in shopping cart volumes and conversion rates. Customers can opt to have the products delivered to a designated cash-and-carry store or to a different location of their choice.
Landgard has deployed SAP Commerce Cloud as a solution not only for its customers but also for its sales team. Instead of using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or hard-copy catalogs, key account managers can show prospective customers the myLandgard web shop on a mobile device. For example, they can now display the full range of potted plants with detailed pictures, including a magnifying glass for closer inspection along with product descriptions and other important information. This helps Landgard acquire new customers and grow the business.
Landgard collaborated closely with Medienwerft, part of FIS Information Systems and Consulting, on the deployment. The technology company was chosen because of its expertise in SAP Commerce Cloud and the headless approach, ERP integration, and retail systems from SAP.
Lead Product Owner e-Commerce, Landgard Service GmbH
Growing the green shoots of digitalization and multichanneling
As part of its e-commerce road map, the company aims to take another major step to provide customers with the same product range, shopping experience, and digital services whether they go online or shop in-store. Following the go-live of myLandgard for its first format of potted plants and the setting up of the event web shop, it will also integrate the floristry, horticultural supplies, and decorative items formats into myLandgard. With its multichannel approach, the company hopes to drive cross-selling potential by giving customers one digital access point to the full product range.
Furthermore, Landgard is integrating large purchasing organizations, whose stores will have access to the myLandgard web shop and who’ll be able to buy products to offer to their own customers.
Featured partner
Medienwerft GmbH, part of FIS Information Systems and Consulting GmbH, was the implementation partner for the SAP Commerce Cloud solution. Highly experienced in SAP Commerce Cloud as well as customer experience, Medienwerft—in close collaboration with Landgard—developed myLandgard in line with user requirements to make complex business processes for plant wholesalers much easier.