An Ecommerce Upgrade for a Direct Sales Appliance That Does It All

One Appliance Does It All

Thermomix centers its business around a revolutionary kitchen appliance that can chop, mix, blend, sauté, steam, and more. Their current model, the TM6, is Wi-Fi enabled, allowing it to access a recipe library with more than 80,000 dishes. The TM6 also offers Guided Cooking through their proprietary Cookidoo app, which delivers step-by-step instructions while the TM6 itself controls the entire cooking process, adjusting times, temperatures, and speeds automatically.
 
The story of Thermomix has just as many unique ingredients as the meals it creates. It was invented in late 1960s by Hansjörg Gerber of Switzerland, a sales manager employed in France for the German direct sales company Vorwerk. After watching a soup-making demonstration, Gerber had the simple idea of combining Vorwerk’s blender with a heating element. Fifty years later, Thermomix delivers over one billion euros in annual sales, sold on four continents through a network of distributors and a sales force of tends of thousands of commission-based consultants.
 
Like any modern direct sales company, the internet helped their business rise. But over time, as they added new functionality, their ecommerce platform fell behind. Outages and low page-speed loads were becoming noticeable, data was being managed with outdated systems, and manual processes were needed to share information across vital business applications. The day-to-day operation was becoming inefficient and expensive, and threatened to impact their revenue growth.
 
Thermomix engaged Guidance to help them whip up a new recipe for success. They selected Shopify Plus as the solution to build a next-generation site that’s flexible, scalable, and easy to maintain. That also provided the benefit of adding future functionality faster, and a lower cost, with Shopify apps. Additionally, Guidance developed a custom middleware layer on Celigo’s integrated platform as a service (iPaas), to connect all the business systems that contribute to making Thermomix a direct sales success story.

Spotlighting the Star of the Show

One of the primary challenges faced by Thermomix was the presentation of its flagship product, the TM6. They reported that customers couldn’t quickly or easily understand just how versatile the appliance is. Without a clear understanding of the TM6’s functions – it can replace as many as 20 individual appliances – not only wasn’t the value being communicated, but the price point ($1,650) was a bit shocking to potential customers as a result.
 
To address this, Guidance revamped Thermomix’s content strategy. Information commonly found on a product detail page (PDP) was brought to the homepage, with helpful icons to show site visitors immediately and at-a-glance just how many functions the TM6 can perform. As visitors continue down the page, they’re presented with video elements, success stories, examples from the Cookidoo digital recipe app, and more. These are all blended with opportunities to schedule a free cooking demo, which is the primary means by which Thermomix drives sales. This type of product storytelling – or “scrolly-telling” as Guidance calls it – gives the website a fresh, stylish, and cutting-edge feel, which also reflects the innovation, versatility, and convenience of the TM6 itself.

Additionally, Guidance redesigned the product detail pages (PDPs) with an eye to highlighting the TM6’s key features. Two distinct PDP templates were created: A standard template for everything that isn’t a TM6, and one unique to the TM6, which also accounts for purchase limitations (no more than two per person), and an enhanced product presentation. It features engaging visuals for everything included in the purchase; customer ratings and testimonials; an explainer video; and another pitch to join the consultant team. The shopping experience is more intuitive than before, deeply informative without being overwhelming.

Setting Up for Direct Sales Success

Shopify Plus is a powerful ecommerce solution, and it’s also a very flexible one, which made it a perfect choice for Thermomix’s replatforming. As a direct sales business, Thermomix caters to two target audiences. The first audience includes regular customers, the home cooks who have typical desires – eating healthy, saving time, and simplifying the meal preparation process. The second audience has these same desires but also has an entrepreneurial streak. They’re interested in working for themselves or adding a supplemental source of income to their household, and find the TM6 so compelling that they want to join Thermomix’s consultant program.
 
Inside Shopify Plus, Guidance customized the "My Account" section to accommodate both regular customers and consultants. Regular customers see standard account features, while consultants have access to a dedicated dashboard with direct-sales-specific information such as onboarding checklists, order tracking, and commission details.
 
Another key feature is the introduction of an automated consultant attribution system. Every consultant is assigned a unique link, ensuring that any purchase made with that link is tracked within Shopify Plus and correctly attributed to the proper consultant. Naturally, this setup is integrated with downstream platforms, triggering accurate commission payments and reducing administrative overhead.

The Hub Where It All Happens

Out of the box, Shopify Plus doesn’t naturally support a direct sales business. Third-party plugins can help with basic functions of affiliate marketing, for example, but not at the level Thermomix needed to support their consultants and grow their attribution revenue. Given the complexity of their business, and the variety of platforms they used, building out a robust middleware layer was a necessity.
 
Guidance chose Celigo, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), for centralized management of Thermomix’s data flows. This cloud-based middleware solution seamlessly syncs data between Shopify Plus and multiple downstream systems, providing a scalable and flexible architecture that supports future growth and additional platform integrations.
 
As a result of the replatforming project, for example, the Celigo middleware implementation automates order processing from Shopify Plus through to their ERP, SAP Business ByDesign, eliminating manual entry errors and significantly reducing processing time. Celigo also routes customer and order data from Shopify Plus to their lead management system, Salesforce, improving lead tracking and conversion insights.
 
Thermomix also uses an external registration app for signing up new consultants. Guidance built an API to send information from the registration app through Celigo to Shopify Plus, to automatically create new consultant accounts in the ecommerce platform. From there, the newly minted consultant can then purchase of a TM6, completing a frictionless onboarding experience.

Commission Control

When consultants are responsible for a significant portion of lead generation and sales revenue, efficient sales attribution and commission management are absolute must-haves. Originally, Guidance implemented InfoTrax as to handle their commission tracking, but later, Thermomix decided on using Exigo as their direct sales platform, and with custom consultant dashboards set up in Shopify Plus, Thermomix needed data to flow freely between the two for accurate commission tracking and payment.
 
The Celigo middleware solution built by Guidance allowed for commissions to be properly recorded and managed within Exigo while ensuring that all transactions were validated against purchase data in Shopify Plus. Consultants can track their commissions in real time and see their performance through the custom My Account dashboard in Shopify Plus. Additionally, the middleware connects Exigo with Thermomix’s ERP, SAP ByDesign, to enable automated and timely commission payouts.

Keeping the Data Fresh

Useful business intelligence depends on a combination of comprehensive data capture and the means to develop actionable insights from that data. But at the time the project began, what passed for a data warehouse at Thermomix was just a simple SQL database. As part of the replatforming, Guidance chose Google’s BigQuery as the enterprise-level data warehouse solution and mapped out a detailed data migration strategy. Additionally, BigQuery was connected through the middleware layer to the rest of Thermomix’s platforms, seamlessly collecting and managing information from multiple business systems.
 
This resolved one of the biggest challenges Thermomix faced – a previous inability to perform point-in-time queries. With direct sales consultants as their primary revenue drivers, Thermomix needed to be able to determine the status of all their consultants (active or pending) as of a specific date, to properly attribute sales and pay out commissions. Ideally, this would be done in a timely and automated manner, to keep consultants happy. Guidance helped develop queries for Thermomix to use for their existing business intelligence platform, Tableau, which take better advantage of the data visualization and manipulation opportunities that a fully functioning data warehouse enabled.