Opening Indonesia and Vietnam to RS Group without a new platform for each market

Customer background

RS Group distributes industrial and electronic products, from connectors and sensors to test equipment and tools, to engineers and maintenance teams worldwide. Its customers use RS to keep production lines, labs and facilities running, so they expect to find the exact part quickly, in their own language, at a price in their own currency.

Box UK has been RS Group’s digital partner since 2013. When RS Group looked to Southeast Asia, it brought the work to a team that already knew its business.

The challenge

RS Group saw an opportunity to grow its digital presence in Southeast Asia and wanted to move quickly. Indonesia and Vietnam were the first two markets.

Speed couldn’t come at the expense of the standard RS customers expect elsewhere. Each site needed a catalogue of more than 60,000 products, support for local languages, and pricing that could handle multiple currencies along with RS Group’s complex structure of product variations and combinations. And it all had to perform at enterprise level.

That made the choice of platform, and how to set it up, the first big decision.

Our approach

Box UK had worked with RS Group since 2013, so the team came to the project already understanding RS Group’s business operations and the requirements of its industry. That knowledge shaped the project from the start.

The platform was WordPress and WooCommerce, set up as a multi-site so that each market runs as its own site on a shared foundation.

The work ran in agile sprints, with Box UK working remotely with regional stakeholders in Indonesia and Vietnam throughout. Over nine sprints, that approach produced a platform built for both markets at once.

What we built

Each regional site carries RS Group’s catalogue of more than 60,000 industrial and electronic products, so engineers in Indonesia and Vietnam can search and buy from the full range.

Pricing needed its own engine. A multi-currency pricing engine handles RS Group’s complex pricing structures, including products with many variations and combinations, so customers see the right price in their own currency. Language localisation means each site works in the local language.

Underneath, a custom multi-site infrastructure lets RS Group launch a further regional site from the same foundation instead of starting again. The platform integrates with RS Group’s enterprise backend systems, so orders and product data flow into existing operations. Caching and performance optimisation prepared it for enterprise-level traffic, with security measures built in throughout.

Building all of that in nine sprints depended on how the delivery was run.

Delivery

The platform was built in nine sprints. Regional stakeholders in Indonesia and Vietnam were involved remotely throughout, so local requirements fed into the build as it progressed. Both sites launched with no disruption to RS Group’s existing operations.

The outcome

RS Group now sells online in Indonesia and Vietnam, with its full catalogue, local languages and local-currency pricing. Both sites run on the same platform, which makes managing a catalogue of more than 60,000 products across markets simpler for RS Group’s teams.

The multi-site foundation also means the next market should be quicker to open: a new regional site can launch from the platform that already exists.

Frequently asked questions