The world’s largest manufacturer of consumer electronics wasn’t selling directly to their customers online. The folks at Samsung knew they were missing out. They also knew that building an ecommerce solution to serve 176 countries is a formidable task. Even though we’re a small team, we were up for the job.
We can’t share all the gritty details, but we were an instrumental partner, helping Samsung to create a strategy, build an ecommerce platform, architect a global API, and then deploy worldwide, efficiently and securely.
01 · The work
Samsung is a $300-billion company, dedicated to offering first-rate products and services to customers around the world. It’s also committed to upholding international standards while complying with local laws and regulations. The company’s ecommerce platform needed to match its operations: best-in-class and globally accessible but adaptable to regional markets.
Building for one country is hard. Building for 176 — each with its own taxes, payment methods, fulfillment partners, languages, currencies, and legal frameworks — multiplies the surface area of every decision. The platform had to absorb that variability without fragmenting into a tangle of regional one-offs.
02 · The results
Samsung’s ecommerce platform and API work seamlessly, everywhere. We proved it by rolling out to some of Samsung’s key markets first: Brazil, Canada, Australia, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and Vietnam. Years later, the platform has experienced zero downtime.
With a shoestring team, we’ve maintained the infrastructure with the ultimate goal of transitioning it completely to Samsung.
03 · A robust, flexible platform
The unified solution we built accommodates everything from customer purchasing to insurance, warehousing, fulfillment, and logistics — in every country Samsung sells in. While many requirements are the same from market to market, local customs, laws, and partners affect online sales and order fulfillment. Samsung’s ecommerce platform is flexible enough to serve any and all custom integrations and regional needs.
04 · A global API
All of Samsung’s ecommerce sales — including online, mobile app, in-store point-of-sale systems, and omnichannel solutions — now go through a single, global API that we designed, implemented, and (to date) maintain.
In addition to helping Samsung continuously grow, scale, and offer the best possible products and services to its customers, the API helps Samsung’s partners get started quickly; the majority of new partners can essentially plug-and-play.
Thank yous
As a small team, we were thrilled for the opportunity to help such a large company better serve so many customers. We couldn’t have done it without the expert team at Accenture Interactive, in Sydney, our partners at Fictive Kin, in Brooklyn, and our friends at Samsung, in Suwon.