"We didn't know beforehand what possibilities a PIM offers and how flexible it can be. Akeneo greatly helps us with the future viability of our data."

The Challenge

Today, Shop Apotheke Europe operates online pharmacies in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Shop Apotheke Europe delivers a wide range of over 120,000 original products to over 4.5 million active customers quickly and at attractive prices. The company’s goals are to drive growth, optimize processes, streamline the organization, and enable their consumers to receive the same experience online as in the local pharmacy.

However, this only works when customers in the online pharmacy shop find comprehensive product information such as applications, dosage, side effects, interactions, reviews, and more. The interaction between the ERP and Shop Apotheke Europe’s home-grown PIM development soon became unmanageable due to its lack of flexibility, requiring repeated programming efforts for adjustments. Additionally, the system was not stable, and outages became frequent.

Due to the time-consuming data preparation and maintenance, the product lead times were long – too long to respond quickly. Furthermore, product data quality suffered from a lack of transparency, making it difficult to expand the product range. The goal was to replace the home-grown system with a new, stable, and flexible PIM, streamline workflows, simplify data maintenance, and generate transparency so that international expansion could be advanced on solid foundations.

Discover how Akeneo PIM’s open-source technology and built-in community of product experience (PX) experts enabled Shop Apotheke Europe to enhance their digital presence across seven countries and manage over 500,000 SKUs with efficiency and speed.