Challenge
For years, Heidenreich had relied on an online store built and maintained centrally by its parent group. But Norwegian customers expected something different.
Between 2019 and 2022, while overall Heidenreich was growing and order volumes increased, the number of customers actively using the ecommerce channel declined. Customers searched for products on competitor websites before placing orders with Heidenreich by phone or email. The online store had become a liability in a market where B2B buyers expected a B2C-quality ecommerce experience: intuitive navigation, relevant product relations, rich product data, and always the right price for the right customer.
The market dynamics made the challenge urgent. While Heidenreich is a power player, it remains a challenger in a Norwegian market where one competitor controls roughly 60% share. To take market share, Heidenreich needed to offer something the larger players were not offering.
"We are the challenger in our market. We must innovate. We can't simply copy the market leader and expect to gain market share," says James Bell Ocampo, IT and Digitalization Director, Heidenreich.
Heidenreich manages 60,000 products and 13,000 companies, each with individually negotiated pricing agreements and layered discount structures. Any new solution that served customers properly had to handle that pricing and product data complexity in real time, for every customer session. That combination of volume and complexity had kept better options out of reach.
In late 2022, Heidenreich appointed its first IT and Digitalization Director, James Bell Ocampo, with a mandate to modernise the full stack. A new commerce platform became the centrepiece of that strategy.
"We are the challenger in our market. We must innovate. We can't simply copy the market leader and expect to gain market share."
James Bell Ocampo, IT and Digitalization Director, Heidenreich
Action
Heidenreich rebuilt the commerce stack from the ground up. Together with solution partner Knowit, James and his team selected Norce as the commerce engine, creating a composable architecture where every component can evolve independently.
Heidenreich's commerce stack is built around Norce Commerce as the central engine:
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AS400 (VV90) as ERP
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Sanity as CMS
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Algolia for search
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Azure AD B2C for identity management
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Custom-built integration hub connecting all systems
Norce was selected for several reasons. First, and foremost the powerful pricing engine. With 13,000 customer accounts and 60,000 products, each with individually negotiated prices and layered discount structures, the system needed to manage roughly 550 million unique price records and serve them performantly. API quality and documentation mattered equally, letting the team build integrations at the pace the eight-month timeline demanded. The composable architecture, the product roadmap, and the established working relationship between Norce and Knowit completed the picture.
"We have 550 million unique price records that Norce handles. Without that capability, the whole project would have stopped before it started," says Bell Ocampo.
Heidenreich runs on Norce Enterprise, the single-tenant SaaS offering. That gives the business dedicated compute resources and full isolation of applications, databases, and storage, deployed in a chosen Azure region. The enterprise tier adds support for customer-specific adaptations and customised release schedules.
The project moved quickly. Development began in February 2024. The first customer went live on 11 September, eight months after project kickoff.
"We have 550 million unique price records that Norce handles. Without that capability, the whole project would have stopped before it started."
"The performance is what makes this work. You can put a hundred items in the cart and it stays snappy. With 60,000 products, individual pricing, stock, and images all in play, that responsiveness is what our customers feel every time they use it."
James Bell Ocampo, IT and Digitalization Director, Heidenreich.
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Impact
The first full year on the new solution delivered numbers that exceeded every internal target. For 2025, Heidenreich set a goal of 32 million EUR in digital sales. Actual digital revenue came in at 45 million EUR, with a record month of 5.5 million EUR in October alone. Roughly 60,000 orders flowed through the system over the year, at an average order value around 790 EUR. Twelve months after full launch, the business is still growing at roughly 50% year on year.
Within the HVAC and plumbing segment, where digital ordering is central to how customers work, digital sales moved from around 30% to 50% of total revenue. In-store sales remained stable The largest shift primarily came from manual orders placed by phone or email and from legacy system-to-system ordering flows that offered no product information or images.
New customers have kept signing up at a steady pace, with roughly 50 new companies and 100 new users joining every week. Segments that had previously refused to buy from Heidenreich until a modern ecommerce solution existed are now active accounts.
In 2025, Heidenreich won two separate industry awards for Wholesaler of the Year. The new commerce platform was highlighted as a key contributor in both recognitions. The project is now being studied across the wider Cordes & Graefe group as other markets evaluate the Norwegian model.
Despite the scale, the full digital operation is run by a team of three people. Together, they manage roughly half of the HVAC and plumbing business, which sits at around 93 million EUR in annual revenue.
James points to the customer-facing experience as the foundation of the result. Prices, stock levels, images, and related products load instantly, even with 60,000 products and individually negotiated pricing in play. Customers find what they need in their own working language and move straight to checkout. With Norce serving the full product and pricing layer in milliseconds, the storefront stays fast no matter how much complexity sits behind it. For a plumber on a job site with a phone in one hand, that speed is the experience.
"The performance is what makes this work. You can put a hundred items in the cart and it stays snappy. With 60,000 products, individual pricing, stock, and images all in play, that responsiveness is what our customers feel every time they use it," says Bell Ocampo.
