New B2C Elkov Elektro e-shop with 30,000 products that update automatically

The goal was not another redesign of the old e-shop, but a new foundation for digital sales, with separate B2C and B2B channels. And this was no “small website”: as part of a group with 46 branches and nearly 700 employees, the e-shop is a key sales channel for a company of this size.

The main challenge was not on the surface, but in the data. The new platform had to cover more than 85,000 stock items at the central warehouse in Brno, 20,000 in Prague and around 300,000 additional items available to order from nearly 2,500 suppliers. Elkov’s team also creates more than 2,500 new product records each month and processes dozens of supplier price lists, so managing data separately for the e-shop was out of the question. The B2B market is also rapidly moving into the digital space: according to Gartner, 83% of B2B buyers now prefer self-service digital channels.

We built the solution on a combination of two CMS platforms, Xperience by Kentico and Kentico Xperience 13, as native e-commerce integration in XbyK was still in development at the time. Thanks to the officially supported integration between the two systems, we transferred robust, proven e-commerce logic from the older version while leveraging the modern capabilities of the new DXP. This meant we did not have to build e-commerce from scratch or risk a complete rewrite; the open-source licence also enabled extensive customisation.

Data flows automatically: integration with the client’s ERP layer (myWAC) via Azure Service Bus and REST API synchronises products, prices and stock, while sending orders without manual re-entry. We built search across tens of thousands of products on Azure AI Search and enhanced checkout with the ČSOB payment gateway and carrier widgets (PPL, Zásilkovna).