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Growing pains
The company’s success did come with a few hiccups. Leapp chose to put all their cards on growth, and accept the accompanying low profit margins for the time being. That way the company could invest in keeping their position as market leader and stay ahead of the competition. The strategy worked well, until their largest investor pulled back. Finding a new shareholder took longer than desired, which pushed Leapp into trouble.
Martijn: “At that point Leapp more or less grew itself to pieces, became a victim of its own success.” Luckily, following a bankruptcy halfway 2018, the company could restart with a new financial backer. To ensure consumer trust, Leapp decided to continue honouring the warranties given out before the bankruptcy: quite unusual, but a strong message to its many customers.
Switch to Shopify Plus
The relaunch was also a good moment to reassess the company’s business processes, in particular its IT infrastructure. Martijn was very much in favour of making a switch to a standardized eCommerce platform. Leapp’s webshop ran on a self-built system at the time, which frequently made things complicated. “When you’re operating on such a young market there is already enough to figure out. As a company you don’t really want to waste time and resources on things like software. It’s important to keep things simple at a few crucial points, otherwise it just becomes too much.”
Some more functions we will add
What Leapp needed was an enterprise eCommerce platform which had already proven its value conclusively, which continuously updated itself, and which excelled at scalability. “If you want to scale up quickly a standard platform is simply the best choice.”
Even before the bankruptcy Martijn had been in touch with CODE about the possibilities of Shopify Plus. The POS (Point-of-sale) checkout system in particular was interesting for Leapp: it made the integration of the whole ecosystem of webshop and stores possible, with individual accounts for employees and at customer service. A must for a fast growing company with 50+ employees and a revenue of several million euros!
"If you want to scale up quickly a standard platform is simply the best choice."
- Martijn Cornelissen, CDO Leapp
Smooth collaboration
Building the new infrastructure was a joint project of Leapp and Code. Martijn was quite pleased with it: “Code did the data migration and the templates and gave a lot of useful tips and advice, but we were also able to do a lot ourselves. In the end we needed about 8 to 10 sprints to go live.”
The new webshop was launched at the end of March 2019. Does Martijn already see the difference? “Certainly! I am very contented so far! Not that we’re making twice as much profit all of a sudden, it’s primarily Shopify Plus’ user-friendliness that improves things. It saves so much time. Whenever there’s a challenge we have a look around in the Shopify app store and we can usually fix it quickly. And if we want something we can’t do ourselves, we call Code.”
Want to call Code as well sometime? We would love to think along with you about the scalable platform that will help your company grow even faster: Shopify Plus that is. Send us an email, or visit us in Delft or Amsterdam!
