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Virbac

Founded in 1968, Virbac is the 8th largest veterinary pharmaceutical group in the world with production, R&D, and sales subsidiaries in over 45 countries.

Key Points

Fully functional and localised store

Consistent brand and user experience across all regions

Ownership of products and brand in the B2C online retail market

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The Client

Founded in 1968, Virbac is the 8th largest veterinary pharmaceutical group in the world with production, R&D, and sales subsidiaries in over 45 countries.

The Challenge

Virbac were looking for a full platform solution which they could provide to their local partners with a fully functional and localised store and supporting infrastructure. This solution needed to be easily replicable and localisable. This would allow Virbac to expand into local regions where the eCommerce operation would be managed and localised appropriately by their regional teams while maintaining core functionality from a centralised authority, provided and maintained by Virbac Global.

Aware that other retailers were already established in the current markets selling Virbac products, Virbac needed to be up and running as quickly as possible.

The process needed to be expedient due to very tight deadlines – 2 months. The view of the store was well defined during the discovery process and visual direction was also guided by discovery and brand guidelines. This allowed for an accurate design for the brand vision for the MVP version of the store. There were very few revisions or changes required.

The other challenge was the capability to roll out localised stores that were controlled from a central Core Model. We developed a DevOps workflow to allow for store localisation with easy local implementation but more critically the capability to update all local implementations from the Core Model. This saves a lot of time and effort in speeding up the rollout of the stores and for future stores also.

Project Summary

Tech Partners

Project Team

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Our Solution

Virbac used its own internal team to integrate their ERP system with BigCommerce with our technical support. Adyen was chosen for the payment gateway due to its coverage of currencies and regions. Shipping was determined by the local regions’ available providers.

BigCommerce provided Virbac with a strong centralised platform with versatile inbuilt functionality to meet their requirements with external integrations and plugins. The extensive API was extremely beneficial to allow Virbac to integrate its own internal systems with the platform. BigCommerce is specifically reputed for its attention to security protocols and strength as a SaaS platform, and security was a continual consideration in Virbac’s development of their B2C operation.

As an eCommerce offering intended to be deployed across many regions and locales the distribution of the stores over BigCommerce’s global data infrastructure and CDN meant the stores themselves would be closer to the customer (and store managers) no matter where in the world they deployed a new operation.

It was a complex project in that as well as the Global team responsible for developing the overall model, it included two regional teams who also influenced and directed the features and experience of the final implementation.

We were very proud to hear that Virbac found it ‘astonishing’ what we had done in only a month post-discovery.