Enabling Global Commerce & Digital Transformation in the Enterprise

Key outcomes

• 5-week Proof of Concept delivering a functional, multi-region prototype
• $1M+ in projected savings per market by reducing cost and complexity of rollouts
• Validated global scalability across APAC, Europe, and North America
• Seamless integration with existing enterprise systems and payment services

Our client is one of the largest information companies with a strong presence across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. To respect their confidentiality due to the sensitive nature of their business, they will be referred to as “Global Information Brand” throughout the length of this case study

Client profile

A Canadian-headquartered, globally recognized corporation, Global Information Brand leads in delivering professional information services across legal, financial, tax, accounting, compliance, and media sectors. Its solutions include subscription-based digital platforms supported by proprietary analytics and workflow tools, helping professionals make timely, informed decisions in complex regulatory environments.

A key part of Global Information Brand’s business is a specialized eCommerce channel for selling physical and digital publications. Tailored to a B2B audience—including law firms, financial institutions, and regulatory bodies—the platform provides access to authoritative resources. The company is known for its content-rich, high-value offerings and maintains a formidable reputation for accuracy, reliability, and expertise in regulated markets.

The challenge: Evaluating in-house development vs. platform investment

For years, Global Information Brand relied on a custom-developed eCommerce platform to support the sale of digital and physical publications across multiple markets. Designed in-house and aligned with their internal workflows, the platform had performed reliably, offering full control over both functionality and user experience.

However, as Global Information Brand evolved and the need for digital agility grew, the existing infrastructure began to show its limitations. What was once a fit-for-purpose solution was being stretched to meet modern demands for speed, scalability, and integration.

Key challenges:

1. Dated technology: their technology stack was not keeping pace with innovation in the marketplace. The combination of platforms required significant internal effort to implement updates, introduce new features, and to maintain all systems humming.
   
   
2. Scalability: Expanding eCommerce operations to new regions has introduced delays in existing regions. Delivering new product lines increased operational complexity for selling and providing existing products.
   
   
3. Operational overhead: Managing high-code customizations, manual integrations, and constant updates required ongoing attention from development teams, diverting focus from innovation.
   
   
4. Integration constraints: Due to the bespoke nature of Global Information Brand’s strategic technology stack, they had to fully manage integrations with checkout and payment providers. This introduced additional complexity driven by varying requirements across geographic regions, and the list of stakeholders for each improvement or extension swelled.
   
   
5. Cross-team dependencies: Updates often required tight coordination between business and technical teams, increasing lead times and reducing overall agility.
   
   
6. High cost of deployment across markets: The total cost of ownership of the incumbent technology stack made it untenable to expand the solution into underserved markets in APAC, Europe, or smaller business units. Project costs approached one million dollars per rollout, with frequent budget overages driven by inconsistent business requirements across teams.

The Global Information Brand was not just seeking a new platform—it was seeking a strategic foundation that would support long-term growth, deliver better customer experiences, and align with existing operational models.

The opportunity: A strategic Proof of Concept

Recognizing the need for clarity and reduced risk, Tidal Commerce proposed a Proof of Concept (PoC) as a smart and structured way to evaluate modern eCommerce alternatives. Rather than committing to a full-scale rebuild with significant investment, the PoC offered a low-risk, insight-driven approach to test assumptions and validate key decisions.

The PoC was designed to answer a critical question: Can a modern eCommerce platform meet Global Information Brand’s business and technical requirements while enabling faster, scalable, and cost-effective growth?

This approach allowed Global Information Brand to explore functionality, evaluate integration capabilities, and test user experience without committing to full implementation. It provided a valuable space for validation, alignment, and informed decision-making across technical and business stakeholders.

Our approach

Tidal executed a structured PoC engagement in three core phases:

Comprehensive discovery

‍Working closely with both technical and business teams, Tidal mapped existing pain points, technology constraints, integration needs, and business goals. This phase provided critical insight into user flows, compliance requirements, and operational  bottlenecks.

Platform evaluation and prototyping

‍Based on discovery insights, Tidal evaluated leading composable eCommerce platforms against criteria such as:

• Setup speed and ease of customization
• API extensibility and integration capabilities
• Checkout and order management flexibility
• Scalability across regions, currencies, and languages
• Platform total cost of ownership, including global rollout, service maintenance, and full end-to-end deployment of projects
• Overall technical feasibility

Global Information Brand selected commercetools for the prototype, due to its flexible Composable nature and enterprise-grade scalability.

Tidal then built a fully functional prototype simulating real-world conditions, with multi-currency, multi-geography, and multi-language support, demonstrating technical feasibility across core e-Store functionalities. Key features included:

1. Digital Storefront
2. Content, Data, Product Catalog, and Product Management
3. Search, Filter, and Sort
4. Cart and Checkout
5. Payment Processing
6. Order Management & Fulfillment
7. Homepage & Product Details Page
8. User Profiles, Login, and Authentication
9. System Integrations
10. Customer Support

Integration Testing & Validation

The prototype integrated seamlessly with Global Information Brand’s existing technology ecosystem, including modern payment gateways, address validation services for accurate checkout processing, event-triggered email systems, and analytics platforms to support data-driven insights. User acceptance testing was successfully conducted with a global testing group, ensuring that geographical requirements across APAC, Europe, and other key regions were fully met.

Results: confidence to move forward

The Proof of Concept delivered clear, tangible outcomes aligned with Global Information Brand’s strategic goals and technical requirements. Following its presentation to senior leadership, the solution framework and IP developed during the PoC were rapidly adopted and deployed in key Asia-Pacific markets, including Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong—with further rollouts planned across Europe and the United States. Early site activity demonstrated immediate impact, with transactions occurring within minutes of launch and a noticeably streamlined user experience driving higher revenue with less friction.

Reflecting on the PoC’s success, one of Global Information Brand stakeholders shared:

“Bravo for challenging our thinking on how this could be done and ruthless execution to achieve this outcome so quickly. Lastly, hurrah for turning off the old, debt-ridden sites.”

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The Proof-of-Concept key results included:

1. Validated business and technical fit: The prototype confirmed that a headless, composable platform like commercetools could support both digital and physical product sales, scale globally, and integrate with key systems.
2. Informed platform recommendation: Insights gathered during the discovery phase were used to evaluate multiple eCommerce options. The team assessed platform capabilities against a set of defined criteria, ultimately recommending commercetools. This market-leading solution aligned with Global Information Brand’s present and future objectives.
3. Accelerated implementation confidence: By simulating end-to-end workflows—product discovery, checkout, and order processing—the PoC gave stakeholders a clear view of how quickly and effectively a new solution could be deployed.
4. Successful integrations: The prototype proved commercetools’ compatibility with Global Information Brand’s preferred tools and services, reducing concerns around disruption or reengineering.
5. Modernized user experience: The prototype demonstrated a responsive, updated UI and streamlined experience, confirming that the new platform could meet evolving customer expectations.

The Proof of Concept demonstrated an enhanced customer experience and a modernized web storefront. It validated that the solution was simple, scalable, and cost-effective—giving the client confidence to move forward with full implementation.

Summarizing the collaborative spirit and the team’s achievement, another member of Global Information Brand remarked:

This positive feedback from internal client teams confirmed that the solution was well-aligned with the company's operational needs and was delivered rapidly and effectively. The PoC enabled a confident, low-risk transition into a full pilot phase, with the groundwork laid for scalable growth.

The enthusiastic and positive feedback from internal client teams confirmed that the solution was well-aligned with the company's operational needs and was delivered rapidly and effectively. The PoC enabled a confident, low-risk transition into a full pilot phase, with the groundwork laid for scalable growth.

Looking Ahead

The prototype served as a blueprint for Global Information Brand’s future eCommerce transformation. By investing in early validation through a Proof of Concept, this multinational's exemplary stride in developing a proof-of-concept digital experience that can be scaled globally with a modular architecture, enabling them to leverage the best commerce experiences to serve each customer best. As Tidal and commercetools continue in partnership, we are excited to see how these experiences enable underserved groups to gain access to important IP that is owned and distributed by this multi-national on a dynamic new commerce technology stack. This work has opened a direct line of sight to better serve global communities and deliver essential information services further, better, and more easily.

About commercetools‍

commercetools is the leading enterprise commerce platform built to power innovation and versatility for the world’s leading brands. Our composable, cloud-native technology provides the flexibility to design tailored, scalable commerce experiences across any channel, at any scale — whether in stores, on social media, through connected devices, or in augmented reality. By removing the constraints of legacy systems, commercetools enables companies to innovate freely, personalize at scale, and quickly launch new channels to meet the evolving demands of their customers.

As trusted partners to brands like Audi, Danone, Eurail, NBCUniversal, and Sephora, commercetools helps its customers set the pace of innovation, deliver exceptional experiences, and achieve sustainable growth. With commercetools, businesses don’t just adapt to change — they lead it.

To learn more, visit commercetools.com.