Powering healthcare innovation at Werlabs: From Magento to best-of-need services.

Werlabs had originally built their webshop on Magento, which was starting to get in the way of desired customizations on the front end as well as overall the pace of change. Werlabs decided it was time to move away from a highly opinionated, full feature platform that offered functionality they didn’t need. At the same time, these extraneous functions often got in the way of customizations they required.

They wanted the freedom to compose a solution that aligned with their site management and operational goals such as:

• Implement a best-of-need CMS where Werlab editors could readily create new pages that could also be optimized for SEO.
• Centralize all Werlabs content — editorial, educational and product — into one CMS that would not be restricted by the commerce platform and can be published in multiple destinations.
• Set up, run, and measure A/B tests on desired customizations to the frontend

The new approach brought benefits to all key stakeholders:

• Developers
  Devs appreciated that they were able to implement Commerce Layer in their proof of concept (POC) within a few days. The code performed so well that they were able to reuse it for their live composable store. A big part of this was Commerce Layer’s integration with Werlab’s preferred payment gateway Klarna, which was widely used and highly trusted in northern Europe, especially in Sweden.
• Content creators
  Content editors also realized the advantages of managing content separately from the commerce engine. Werlab’s editors manage all types of content - editorial, product, support - that can be accessed through multiple destinations. Back when Werlabs was on Magento, content editors had to be outfitted with specific roles and permissions in separate systems. Having all this content centralized in a CMS eliminated content duplication, which also minimized errors and greatly increased operational efficiency. As a bonus, new editors could be easily onboarded by training them on a single tool instead of multiple.
• Marketing teams
  Marketing professionals also expressed great satisfaction with the newfound flexibility in creating pages. In the past, they were required to build PDPs for every single variation of their product, which necessitated a spider web of redirects and canonical URLs to properly optimize their primary product pages for search. With Commerce Layer and the new stack, they could now have freedom in the way they build pages and create as many as they need, breaking the 1 SKU = 1 PDP ratio that was at the unbreakable base of the previous stack. A SKU in Commerce Layer is the link between an order’s line item and any content block within the CMS, which can be a whole PDP page or a linked image that represents a variant. SKUs in Commerce Layer do not require a PDP, just a URL. As a result, Werlab’s marketing team had full flexibility in creating any type of page for promotional and SEO purposes. This freedom to build also eliminated the need to create multiple redirects and canonical URLs, resulting in significant time and effort savings. While sparing on unnecessary pages on one side, they could create as many landing pages they needed on the other side, making sure every highly-searched term could have a proper landing page in their site.

The launch saw an immediate 23% improvement on conversion rate which exceeded the 10% target they had set internally. As the new site settles in, Werlabs expects additional benefits around AOV, site performance, and fewer calls into customer service.

Post-launch, Werlabs plans to add subscriptions and offer services to mid-sized B2B companies that want to offer health check plans to their employees. As they experiment with their store (with their newfound freedom to A/B test), they’ll continue to find new opportunities for growth, all of which are easily implemented with their new composable architecture powered by Commerce Layer.