Speeding up 800,000 SKUs with WooCommerce

Kellox was founded in 1950 and serves as Norway’s largest importer of motorized products for land and sea. They sell motorcycles, ATVs, boats, equipment, and parts. As a B2B wholesaler with over 800k SKUs, they’ve taken WooCommerce scalability to the next level with the help of Maksimer, a top WooCommerce development agency.

WooCommerce sat down with co-founders Anders-Meyer Eldøy, Chief Commercial Officer, and Nils-Fredrik Winther-Kaland, CEO, at Maksimer, to learn more about Maksimer’s work with Kellox. 

Critical to Kellox’s ecommerce success is Maksimer, a web development agency and certified Woo Agency Partner. Kellox began working with Maksimer in 2019 when the company was looking to migrate ecommerce platforms to achieve better site performance and customer experiences.

As a large-scale importer, Kellox serves dealerships and other B2C retailers in the marine and auto industries — meaning thousands of products for each client, all aligned to a custom contract. 

Turning challenges into wins

The requirements were steep. Kellox needed:

• Very tight integration with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.
• Fast page load times.
• Management of over 800k SKUs.
• Custom product views for users and user groups.
• Customer logins with validated credentials.
• A B2B self-service wholesale solution.

When Kellox came to Maksimer for the project, Maksimer recommended WooCommerce for a few reasons:

• WooCommerce is Maksimer’s preferred ecommerce platform.
• They already had experience integrating complex ERP systems with WooCommerce, and had confidence in its ability to perform.

Thriving with Maksimer’s integrated SaaS solution

Maksimer offers their own custom SaaS solution that integrates with WooCommerce, and it was exactly what Kellox needed. The solution allows Kellox to surface more data — more quickly — for their customers.

Maksimer created a caching system that enables customers to receive personalized pricing based on their unique contracts or agreements. Custom logic scales Kellox’s database during a customer’s search to pull up the most relevant product data in the shortest possible time.

At 800k SKUs worth of data, this is no small feat. But the flexibility of WordPress and WooCommerce enabled the team to achieve tight integration at such a massive scale.

Kellox needed reliable scalability options for their ecommerce platform. On the back end of Kellox’s WooCommerce store, Maksimer’s scalability work focused on bulk product updates and management. 

When Kellox updates products, they’ll make changes for up to 500,000 products at a time. To make this workload manageable, Maksimer needed to optimize Kellox’s plugins and the way that those plugins fetch data from their database to handle the amount of connections some of the site functionality required. 

One key feature they use is WooCommerce lookup tables. As an early adopter, Maksimer made sure the Kellox site uses these lookup tables as frequently as possible. These tables are used notably to optimize an extensive catalog to filter for in-stock products.

One of the coolest features of Kellox’s website is the customization that aligns with each customer contract. Maksimer created several new builds for customer account pages to make this high level of customization possible.

Kellox’s business model includes exclusive contracts that allow customers to purchase and resell vehicles and parts. Customers all receive custom pricing based on their contract agreement, and the products available within their portals all reflect this.

The portals give customers access to anything they might need: an overview of open and past orders, items on backorder, invoices, warranty registration, access to pricing files, the product image bank, the customer service process, and more. 

Customers can view old products when they’re replaced with a new version with a feature that allows them to search for the older model, and receive a search result for the new version. These search chains can hold over five products that have been updated.

Consumers can also use the site to find dealers for the products that they want: Kellox partners with brands to host their own branded sections of the Kellox website, like this page for Honda motorcycles and its corresponding community hub, where riders can apply for membership and sign up for tours.

And to cap it all off: Maksimer was able to build all of these features into Kellox’s site while keeping page load times under two seconds.

To bring this massive wealth of information to Kellox’s customer portal, the Maksimer team worked closely with Kellox during the discovery phase to understand their landscape of tools and data sources. Using custom API integrations, data flows between Kellox.no and Navision, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software Kellox relies on.

All of the information accessed by customers — including an interactive map that customers can use to search for local dealers — is pulled from Navision. Kellox sells many different types of products, so the map is filterable by product type. “This makes the solution a bit more advanced than the standard dealer list,” Nils-Fredrik said.

Kellox also shares data back to Navision to build new learnings about their customers. These insights help Kellox.no make product recommendations and build upsells by assessing previous purchases and knowing which products can be purchased together. 

Kellox uses PimCore as a product information management (PIM) system to enhance the product information from Navision. PimCore also stores product categorization, additional images, sliders, and other product details. 

“The categories created in PimCore are then transferred via API to WooCommerce, which creates the corresponding category,” Nils-Fredrik shared. “This is very user-friendly, making it quick to place a product in the correct category in PimCore — data which is then transferred to Woo.”

Maksimer works with Nils Hauglad, Chief Financial Officer at Kellox, alongside their IT team, to define specifications for each feature, and then work on test cases together. Kellox also has a small team of developers who work on exposing the API from Navision, so that Maksimer can get the data they need into WooCommerce. All of the development done outside of Navision is managed by the Maksimer team.

Kellox’s blazing-fast page load times — leveraging such massive amounts of data — were achieved through a custom architecture setup. Maksimer developed custom caching systems for Kellox and optimized the data flow for their site plugins. 

Nils-Fredrik was clear that this is a very custom solution: “When we have a client as large as Kellox, it’s a very tailored system. We develop [these solutions] to meet the specific needs of our clients.”

WooCommerce is a fantastic solution for B2B ecommerce, made clear by Kellox and Maksimer’s achievements. 

Kellox measures the success of their website not only in the context of ecommerce, but also as an integral part of their day-to-day business operations. Internally, their customer portal and ERP integration saves the Kellox team a lot of time when managing customer accounts. contracts, warrantees, and more.

They use the customer portal for in-person transactions: account managers will often travel to customers and can use the portal to input orders on the customer’s behalf. The tight integration ensures that no matter who places the order, all of the customer’s information is accessible from within the portal. 

To close out our discussion with Maksimer, we asked them for advice to share with other WooCommerce businesses looking to grow and scale.  

Maksimer’s primary advice for businesses looking to scale with WooCommerce is to begin by identifying bottlenecks on your site. Maksimer does this through stress testing, monitoring, and debugging code and databases. Optimizing your code and database is crucial, as well-structured code and an efficient database can significantly enhance site performance and scalability.

For businesses considering a migration to WooCommerce, Nils-Fredrik shared why he  believes it’s an excellent choice: “For those looking to grow their ecommerce presence, WooCommerce offers a scalable, flexible platform. To make the most of its features, it’s vital to automate and integrate processes to streamline operations and reduce manual tasks, which helps save time and minimize errors.”

How WooCommerce made the Kellox site possible

WooCommerce provided a significant boost in ecommerce functionality, serving as a solid foundation for the project. “The platform’s flexibility allowed us to incorporate a lot of custom work to build the site that Kellox needed. WooCommerce’s robust product management, user management, and intuitive content-building features allowed us to build with ease and its native API capabilities enabled Maksimer to write commands that can be executed in various ways, making integration much smoother.”

“This allowed us to focus our efforts on building integrations and optimizing performance rather than starting from scratch. The biggest strength of WordPress and WooCommerce is its flexibility — it’s easy to extend and modify the code to create new functionalities that align perfectly with our needs, adding value for the client.”

— Nils-Fredrik Winther-Kaland, Chief Executive Officer, Maksimer

“Additionally, WooCommerce offers a wide array of frequently updated extensions, such as payment methods and SEO tools, which are crucial for our project. The platform’s commitment to backward compatibility and documentation also ensures that developers have time to adapt their applications with each new release, helping everything run smoothly and minimizing disruption.”

Lastly, partnering with knowledgeable professionals like Maksimer ensures that you are leveraging best practices tailored specifically to your business needs, setting you up for successful growth. A skilled partner will guide you through the complexities of the transition, ensuring that your new platform is set up correctly and optimized for performance. With the right approach and support, WooCommerce can be a powerful tool to drive your business forward.

Nils-Fredrik Winther-Kaland
Chief Executive Officer at Maksimer AS

Anders-Meyer Eldøy
Chief Commercial Officer at Maksimer AS

Vanessa has spent her career writing helpful things for people across the tech space. Outside of work, she enjoys training for triathlon, rotating through hobbies, and exploring new places both urban and natural. She has two fluffy cats, maintains a few succulents, and has far too many books on her TBR shelf.