How Lekkerland Built a User-Centric B2B Ordering Platform

Lekkerland, a subsidiary of the REWE Group, is a leading European B2B wholesaler, logistics provider, and service provider specializing in on-the-go consumption. For more than 65 years, it has successfully served an extensive and diverse network of petrol station shops, kiosks, convenience stores, and quick-service restaurants across four European countries, namely the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Spain — the latter two under the brand name Conway. 

In the Netherlands alone, Lekkerland operates three distribution centers, employs more than 750 people, and supplies over 8,700 points of sale with a mix of products from its own brands and other leading brand names. The items, which include but are not limited to confectionery, beverages, snacks, fast food, fresh products, tobacco goods, and telephone cards, are then safely delivered by one of Lekkerland’s 160 tri-zone temperature-controlled trucks, ensuring a smooth order fulfillment process from end-to-end.

Aiming to remain “Your most convenient partner” for its customers well into the future, Lekkerland Netherlands embarked on a digital transformation journey. The first — and most important — step? Creating a superior, consistent, and user-centric B2B ordering platform powered by high-performing barcode scanning capabilities for all customers, suppliers, and visitors.

We think that, with Scandit Smart Data Capture, we can make the jobs of our customers easier, with an excellent user experience across our B2B apps on any device, enabling true convenience.

Lonneke Pezie, E-Commerce Consultant at Lekkerland Netherlands

Challenge

Lekkerland has always been attuned to digitalization trends. In 2003, it set up its first webshops in the Netherlands and Belgium for customers to order all their products online. 

Likewise, in 2018, the B2B retailer recognized the need for a mobile-first update to the webshops, in line with wider industry developments, new user behavior, and even operational burdens: many of its customers were ordering via barcode scanning on personal digital assistant (PDA) handheld devices, which were costly to maintain for the business. Creating an ordering platform easily accessible on personal smartphones would uphold Lekkerland’s customer-centricity ethos and also significantly cut costs. 

As part of a phased approach, Lekkerland initially built two mobile apps in both the Netherlands and Belgium, one for iOS and one for Android. These apps would sync orders and complaints with those from the webshops, replicate the look-and-feel, and offer barcode scanning functionality for new workflows. But for these apps to successfully shift users from PDAs to mobile phones, the apps’ user experience (UX) and scanning engine had to be game-changing — otherwise, no one would use them. 

“The user experience is really important, because that platform is the product they are working with. If they don't adopt your product, you've lost,” said Pezie. 

It quickly became apparent that the native scanning capabilities provided by the devices were not up to the task and lacked the performance Lekkerland required: slow scanning speed and low accuracy, mis-scans, and failures to scan in tough conditions meant inconvenience for Lekkerland’s customers, so the B2B retailer went in search of better software. Enter the Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK. 

“We realized that scanning was the core of the product, which is when we came in contact with Scandit. We downloaded a test version from the store, trialed it, and liked it. We had the opportunity to do a pilot, which was successful, and then we tested it with our customers. They immediately asked when we would be able to roll it out.”

Great positive feedback from customers across the Netherlands and Belgium followed after the rollout of the Lekkerland24 and Conway24 mobile apps. Rapid adoption meant the PDA terminals were gradually phased out.

Connecting the Dots

While these complementary mobile apps offered a much-needed boost in UX and a reduction in hardware maintenance costs, this was only part of Lekkerland’s digital transformation journey. Maintaining a corporate website, a webshop, two mobile apps, and two backends in both the Netherlands and Belgium was a drain on resources and challenging to further develop and optimize. 

With the webshop nearing its end of life and because of its old programming language, Lekkerland was heavily dependent on developers for every little tweak and generally unable to modernize the look-and-feel or introduce new features. 

By the early 2020s, its ability to serve valued customers in the way they expect to be served was becoming unsatisfactory.

Solution

Lekkerland replaced all channels with a single, consolidated B2B ordering platform for all customers, suppliers, and visitors, so that “people can do business with Lekkerland very easily, with just one entry”. 

Lekkerland Netherlands and Conway Belgium kicked off the new project at the end of 2022, setting out to migrate to a progressive web app (PWA), a type of website that looks and behaves like a mobile app. Given how instrumental and appreciated the scanning functionality had been for re-ordering on the mobile apps, Lekkerland knew it had to be enabled on the PWA, as well — to ensure a good user experience and, ultimately, a high adoption rate.  

For that particular task, the Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK for the Web seemed like the perfect fit, as it would allow Scandit’s robust and efficient barcode scanning capabilities to be integrated into the new web app with just a few lines of code. To put those claims to the test, the B2B retailer first built, via an independent software vendor, a prototype of the new platform using a test license of the Web SDK and continued optimizing it with Scandit’s support until a complete webshop was finalized. 

Throughout this process, extensive user and field testing across 18 months was key to examining the scanning performance and perfecting the UX. Lekkerland checked the former across several typical real-world scenarios often encountered in food retail: 

• In low light
• At a distance and from wide angles
• Without an internet connection
• When dealing with tough codes (e.g., curved products, under glare, tiny codes, frozen items, crumpled or torn codes) 

The Web SDK passed those tests with flying colors. Scandit exhibited superior speed and accuracy no matter the device thanks to compatibility with over 20,000 smart device models — and gave Lekkerland confidence the project was technologically feasible. 

Great UX was essential

As far as the UX was concerned, Lekkerland based it on that of the mobile apps, albeit with slight modifications, but always prioritizing what users had previously said they liked and needed. Another consideration was that, nowadays, B2B users expect an e-commerce experience similar to the B2C one they are already familiar with from personal use. 

"What I've learned is that it takes time. It's really good to ask customers what their needs are, to test, to interview. But working together with Scandit also showed us how nice it is to have the flexibility to try out things before. You want to make sure that your investment is justified, also for management’s peace of mind."

All in all, on the new platform customers will be able to check their invoices, as well as track their deliveries in real-time, but the scanning functionality remains critical. It will enable them to order and re-order seamlessly, check inventory, make favorite lists, and even register complaints — powering a user-centric one-stop shop that will deliver true convenience. 

Results

Lekkerland successfully launched the beta version of its new B2B ordering platform in July 2024 and is now rolling it out to 5000 customers. Whatever device they’ll be using, users will benefit from a superior and consistent user experience, directly supporting the B2B retailer’s aim to drive “more acquisition, more conversion, more retention”. 

After the migration of all users is complete, Lekkerland Netherlands and Conway Belgium will gradually phase out their current mobile apps, significantly lowering software maintenance costs and improving operational efficiency. 

What’s more, the 65-year-old company will become future-proof and agile thanks to the increased development flexibility it’s gaining. Unlike the current mobile apps and webshops, which are merely functional, the PWA will enable plenty of opportunities to surprise and delight users through promotions, recommendations, messages, and many more. The barcode scanner will be integral to this vision, as it can bring several of these workflows to life in exciting ways, for instance, if combined with augmented reality.

For now, though, Lekkerland is concentrating on onboarding all existing users and optimizing the platform based on their immediate feedback, and Scandit is proud to be alongside every step of the way. 

“I’m not sure where we would be now without Scandit. I don’t think we would have achieved the superior scanning user experience and the accuracy we needed for this PWA replatforming project to be successful and bring true value and convenience to all of our partners,” said Pezie.