Kellox and Maksimer: Accelerating 800,000 SKUs with WooCommerce

Founded in 1950, Kellox serves as Norway’s largest importer of motorized products for land and sea transport. They sell motorcycles, ATVs, boats, equipment and parts. As a B2B wholesaler with over 800,000 SKUs, they have taken WooCommerce scalability to the next level with the help of Maksimer, a leading WooCommerce development agency.

WooCommerce sat down with co-founders Anders-Meyer Eldøy, Chief Commercial Officer, and Nils-Fredrik Winther-Kaland, CEO of Maksimer to learn more about Maksimer’s work with Kellox.

Crucial to Kellox’s e-commerce success is Maksimer, a web development agency and certified Woo agency partner. Kellox began working with Maksimer in 2019 when the company was looking to migrate e-commerce platforms to achieve better site performance and customer experience.

As a large importer, Kellox serves dealerships and other B2C retailers in the marine and automotive industries – meaning thousands of products for each client, all under their own contract.

Turn challenges into wins

The demands were steep. Kellox needs:

• Very tight integration with their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform.
• Fast page loading.
• Manage over 800,000 SKUs.
• Custom display of products for users and user groups.
• Customer login using verified credentials.
• B2B self-service wholesale solution.

When Kellox came to Maksimer for a project, Maksimer recommended WooCommerce for several reasons:

• WooCommerce is Maksimer’s preferred e-commerce platform.
• They already had experience integrating complex ERP systems with WooCommerce and trusted its ability to work.

Thriving with Maksimer’s integrated SaaS solution

Maksimer offers its own SaaS solution that integrates with WooCommerce, and that was exactly what Kellox needed. The solution enables Kellox to display more data – faster – for its customers.

Maksimer has created a caching system that allows customers to receive personalized pricing based on their unique contracts or agreements. Custom logic scales the Kellox database during customer searches to get the most relevant product data in the shortest possible time.

With 800,000 SKUs of data, this is no small feat. But the flexibility of WordPress and WooCommerce allowed the team to achieve tight integration on such a massive scale.

Kellox needed reliable scalability options for its e-commerce platform. On the back end of Kellox’s WooCommerce store, Maksimer’s scalability work focused on mass updates and product management.

When Kellox updates products, it makes changes to up to 500,000 products at once. To make this workload manageable, Maksimer needed to optimize the Kellox plugins and the way those plugins retrieve data from their database to handle the amount of connections that some of the site’s features require.

One of the key features they use is the WooCommerce lookup tables. As an early adopter, Maksimer ensured that the Kellox website used these lookup tables as often as possible. These tables are mainly used to optimize a large catalog for filtering products in stock.

One of the best features of the Kellox website is the customization that is in line with each customer contract. Maksimer has created several new builds for customer account pages to enable this high level of customization.

Kellox’s business model includes exclusive contracts that allow customers to buy and resell vehicles and parts. All customers receive their own pricing based on their contract agreement and all products available on their portals reflect this.

Portals give customers access to everything they could need: overview of open and past orders, backorder items, invoices, warranty registrations, access to pricing files, product image bank, customer service process and more.

Customers can view old products when they are replaced by a new version with a feature that allows them to search for an older model and get a search result for the new version. These search strings may contain more than five products that have been updated.

Consumers can also use this page to find dealers for the products they want: Kellox works with brands to host their own branded sections of the Kellox website, such as this Honda motorcycle page and the relevant community center where riders can apply for membership and log in to trips.

And to top it all off: Maksimer was able to build all these features into the Kellox website while maintaining page load times under two seconds.

To bring this vast amount of information to the Kellox customer portal, the Maksimer team worked closely with Kellox during the discovery phase to understand their landscape of tools and data sources. Kellox Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software uses its own API integration, data flows between Kellox.no and Navision.

All of the information that customers can access – including an interactive map that customers can use to find local dealers – is sourced from Navision. Kellox sells many different types of products, so the map can be filtered by product type. “This makes the solution a bit more advanced than a standard vendor list,” said Nils-Fredrik.

Kellox also shares data back with Navision to gain new insights about its customers. These insights help Kellox.no recommend products and create upsells by evaluating previous purchases and knowing which products can be purchased together.

Kellox uses PimCore as a product information management (PIM) system to enhance product information from Navision. PimCore also stores product categorization, additional images, sliders, and other product details.

“Categories created in PimCore are then transferred via API to WooCommerce, which creates the corresponding category,” said Nils-Fredrik. “This is very user-friendly, allowing you to quickly place a product in the right category in PimCore – data that is then transferred to Woo.”

Maksimer works with Nils Hauglad, Kellox’s CFO, along with their IT team, to define the specifications for each feature and then work together on test cases. Kellox also has a small team of developers working on exposing Navision’s API so that Maksimer can get the data they need into WooCommerce. All development done outside of Navision is managed by the Maksimer team.

Kellox’s insanely fast page load times – using huge amounts of data – were achieved by setting up a custom architecture. Maksimer developed his own caching systems for Kellox and optimized the data flow for his site plugins.

Nils-Fredrik was clear that this is a very customized solution: “When we have a client as big as Kellox, it’s a very customized system. We develop (these solutions) to meet the specific needs of our clients.”

WooCommerce is a fantastic solution for B2B e-commerce, as evidenced by the success of Kellox and Maksimer.

Kellox measures the success of their website not only in the context of e-commerce, but also as an integral part of their day-to-day business operations. Internally, their customer portal and ERP integration saves the Kellox team a lot of time managing customer accounts. contracts, warranties and more.

They use the customer portal for personal transactions: account managers often travel to customers and can use the portal to place orders on behalf of the customer. Tight integration ensures that no matter who places the order, all customer information is accessible from the portal.

To wrap up our discussion with Maksimer, we asked him for some advice to share with other WooCommerce businesses looking to grow and scale.

Maksimer’s primary advice for businesses looking to scale with WooCommerce is to start by identifying bottlenecks on your site. Maksimer does this through stress testing, monitoring and debugging code and databases. Code and database optimization is essential, as well-structured code and an efficient database can greatly increase the performance and scalability of a website.

For businesses considering migrating to WooCommerce, Nils-Fredrik shared why he believes it is a great choice: “For those looking to expand their e-commerce presence, WooCommerce offers a scalable and flexible platform. To make the most of its features, it is vital to automate and integrate processes to simplify operations and reduce manual tasks, helping to save time and minimize errors.”

How WooCommerce made the Kellox website possible

WooCommerce provided a significant boost to e-commerce functionality and served as a solid foundation for the project. “The flexibility of the platform allowed us to incorporate a lot of our own work to create the website that Kellox needed. WooCommerce’s robust product management, user management, and intuitive content creation capabilities allowed us to create easily, and its native API capabilities allowed Maksimer to write commands that could be executed in a variety of ways, making the integration much smoother.”

“This allowed us to focus our efforts on building integrations and optimizing performance rather than starting from scratch. The biggest strength of WordPress and WooCommerce is their flexibility – it’s easy to extend and modify the code to create new features that perfectly match our needs and add value to the client.”

— Nils-Fredrik Winther-Kaland, CEO, Maksimer

“In addition, WooCommerce offers a wide range of frequently updated extensions such as payment methods and SEO tools, which are crucial for our project. The platform’s commitment to backward compatibility and documentation also ensures that developers have time to adapt their applications with each new release, helping everything run smoothly and minimizing disruption.”

Finally, partnering with knowledgeable professionals like Maksimer ensures you’re using best practices tailored to your business needs, allowing you to grow successfully. An experienced partner will guide you through the complexities of the transition and ensure your new platform is properly set up and optimized for performance. With the right approach and support, WooCommerce can be a powerful tool to propel your business forward.