TestEquity Europe
Driving Agile European Expansion for TestEquity
Challenges
For TestEquity, opportunities to expand their established North American brand into the European market required much more than just language translation for their business catalogs and assets. The EU has a complex regulatory landscape, stringent data privacy laws, varying tax assessment, and additional ecommerce considerations to meet modern customers’ currency and payment expectations.
The first European priority for the business was to launch a German ecommerce website. This highly-scalable, localized digital presence would become the model replicated for a planned United Kingdom launch and other European markets that would follow. The product catalog for the German ecommerce storefront would include approximately 8,000 active SKUs/PDPs, with about a 60/40 split between transactional and price-on-application (request-a-quote).
Solutions
TestEquity partnered with Americaneagle.com to implement Shopify Plus at the center of their European ecommerce capabilities and performance. Shopify Plus provides the team with uniquely robust out-of-the-box features that include extensive support for multiregion expansion.
To streamline international operations, the developers utilized Shopify Markets. Built into Shopify Plus, Shopify Markets enables TestEquity to manage region-specific storefronts, currencies, and tax laws from a centralized location. To further advance regulatory compliance, Cookie Bot was also integrated to satisfy European cookie consent requirements.
While TestEquity products, catalogs, and pricing are publicly available, B2B relationships and sales represent the majority of their business. Account-based B2B workflows and efficiencies were built into the new ecommerce solutions. Customer-specific catalogs, contracted pricing, and net terms tailor solutions to TestEquity’s business customers.
Shopify’s Translate and Adapt app provided a foundation for auto-translating content from English to German. The solutions team also developed several customizations to consistently localize elements the app could not natively detect, such as the “request a quote” form. The new website’s default language is German, but with a click of a button, there is a full English language version for users as well.
All product data will be seamlessly integrated with TestEquity’s ERP platform, Epicor P21. Implementing a middleware, the data bridge will ensure up-to-date inventory, pricing, product details, and assets. Shopify’s Search and Discovery app is accelerating product search with advanced category and brand filters. Taxify is now powering sophisticated tax inclusion within shopping carts, with accurate VAT-inclusive pricing adjustments made appropriately per account.
The launch of the German market storefront for TestEquity, a fully localized and immersive experience for German customers, has established a highperformance template for future growth. With the UK site set to be the company’s next launch, TestEquity is confident in their flexible and ERP-integrated ecommerce solutions. The new digital presence has quickly proven to be capable of successfully supporting continued expansion across the European continent.
