Company Overview
The TOM-group is a Dutch international e-business in the non-food sector that has been active for over 13 years in the field of bicycles, bicycle parts and accessories, toys, sports and outdoor, casual clothing, club merchandise, car accessories, eyewear, and home & garden. They reach their customers through one physical shop, 12 consumer webshops, one business webshop, 600 dropshipping partners, and various foreign and domestic marketplaces and platforms. The strategy of combining multiple on- and offline sales channels enables TOM to reach millions of potential customers each day.
The Situation
In the autumn of 2019, TOM decided to divide its company into several business units, each having its field of operation and expertise. TOM Marketplaces (TMP) was set up to create a dedicated and driven business unit to increase marketplace revenue through a specialized and professional marketplace team. With their business's growth came the need for flexible integration software, which would enable them to conveniently expand their business throughout Europe while also handling their vast product range of over 200.000 SKU's. Furthermore, they wanted to reduce their in-house developers' workload since they were already swamped evolving and maintaining their system and websites. It would also enable TMP to fully control all marketplace integrations themselves, allowing them to make adjustments on the fly without continuously consulting their in-house developers.
The Solution
Jorrit Steinz (CEO, ChannelEngine), who has been a well-known associate to the company, was confident that ChannelEngine could provide the much-needed solution for TMP's fast-growing marketplace business. After consultation between both parties, TMP started using ChannelEngine at the start of Q4 in 2019. "First, we started to migrate all existing marketplaces to ChannelEngine," says Gertjan Vosters, marketplace support specialist at TOM. "During this process, ChannelEngine has been very helpful in sharing their experience and providing us with excellent customer support, which has resulted in a very smooth migration altogether." There were only two things that TMP's in-house developers had to make: a product feed and an API-integration. "This was a huge benefit for our developers since they could spend more time on other projects," he elaborates. "It also gave our business unit much more flexibility, as we can now adjust all variables in ChannelEngine's intuitive software without having to change anything in our system technically."
