Global expansion: into Europe and beyond
When BULK POWDERS launched in 2005, they caused a huge stir in the sports nutrition industry. The British-based company manufactured most of their products in house and sold their quality protein powders, probiotics and multivitamins directly to consumers — at prices so low that they annoyed competitors. This direct business model delivered extraordinary growth for BULK POWDERS, who quickly outgrew their small self-storage unit. They soon moved into a state-of-the-art, 16,000-square-feet manufacturing facility and warehouse in Colchester, Essex.
As word spread across Europe that BULK POWDERS offered the best deals in sports nutrition, the company realised they needed to aggressively expand into new territories. With traffic pouring into the BULK POWDERS web store from countries beyond the UK, they also needed to protect their operation from traffic spikes. In 2017, they decided to upgrade their Magento Commerce 1 instance to Adobe Commerce. They needed a platform to spin up dozens of international shops and help their global expansion with different currencies and languages, while providing the best customer experience — even during peak times.
Their e-commerce website got a big lift
Together with their solution partner The Pixel, BULK POWDERS launched new web shops in dozens of locations — including France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden — all supported by regional teams. Orders are received by the UK warehouse, processed by the warehouse management system and delivered out to customers.
On the back end, BULK POWDERS implemented Klarna Checkout, so they can offer multiple payment options, including Pay Later and other payment instalment, with a focus on international payments. The Yotpo artificial intelligence engine collects and displays user generated content, like reviews and centralises this content across all their sites and languages. Meanwhile, SLI Search, powered by predictive analytics, suggests what products shoppers are most likely to buy, based on customer data.
Migrating to the cloud allowed BULK POWDERS to greatly reduce their baseline implementation costs and the cost of global expansion, compared to using a multi-tenet SaaS solution. Today they enjoy scalability, high resilience, PCI compliance and global availability. Most importantly, the cloud offers a simplified integration with their existing systems and the ability to respond quickly to changing technology.