Wholesale & cash-and-carry — B2B commerce

A B2B Wholesale Platform Built Once, Deployed Across Countries

Owned the complete architecture for a global retailer's member-based B2B commerce platform in India. The design was built for multi-country operation from the outset and was subsequently replicated into other markets, including South Africa.

Client
Global retailer — wholesale / cash-and-carry business
Role
Enterprise architect — end-to-end solution architecture ownership
Period
2018-03 – 2019-07

The challenge

A global retailer's wholesale arm was building member-facing commerce on an enterprise platform designed primarily for B2C. Wholesale inverts the assumptions: buyers are members rather than anonymous shoppers, staff place orders on a customer's behalf, catalogue and pricing vary by membership, and a single buyer may operate across stores. The platform also had to work for more than one country — a design that only fitted India would have meant a rebuild for every subsequent market.

Approach

  • Owned the end-to-end solution architecture rather than advising on parts of it — integration, catalogue, pricing, payment, item onboarding and assisted service as one coherent design.
  • Designed for multi-country operation from the start, so market rollout would be configuration and extension rather than redesign.
  • Framed the integration decision explicitly as a comparison, with a documented basis the programme could revisit.
  • Sized the platform from a structured questionnaire completed against the client's real volumes, not a reference model.
  • Built estimates that carried testing, cutover support, post-go-live and engagement management — not just development effort.
  • Identified where standard platform behaviour would not meet a wholesale requirement, early enough for the design to absorb it.

Innovation

  • Built the first market as the template rather than as a one-off — the reason later countries could reuse it instead of repeating it.
  • Treated estimation as an architectural deliverable: the shape of an estimate reveals whether the architecture has actually been thought through.
  • Surfaced B2B gaps against a B2C-oriented platform during design review rather than during build.

Outcome

  • Complete architecture delivered and adopted for the India B2B platform.
  • Design subsequently replicated into further markets, including South Africa.
  • Integration topology decided with a documented rationale the programme could revisit.
  • Platform sizing and estimates accepted and used to scope the implementation.

Recommendations

  • If a second country is even possible, design for it in the first. Retrofitting multi-country support costs more than building it once.
  • Decide the integration topology deliberately and write down why. Inherited defaults are expensive to reverse once flows are built on them.
  • An estimate without testing, cutover and engagement management is not an estimate — it is a development quote.
  • B2B on a B2C platform is mostly a modelling problem. Get membership, pricing and assisted service into design review early.
  • Size from the client's volumes. Reference architectures are a starting point, not an answer.

Technology

  • SAP Commerce (hybris)
  • SAP Process Integration
  • Data Hub
  • Assisted Service Module
  • Multi-country / multi-site configuration
  • Catalogue & pricing modelling

Want the working artefacts?

The account above is the whole story. If you want the material behind it — data models and partitioning, sizing inputs, load-test design, the decision frameworks as something you can actually apply — we will send the appendix for A B2B Wholesale Platform Built Once, Deployed Across Countries to a work address. Client identities stay masked either way.

Facing something similar?

If any of this maps onto a problem you are carrying, we are happy to talk it through — no obligation, and you will get a straight answer about whether it is worth doing.

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