World of Sweets is the UK’s largest confectionery wholesaler, distributor and importer, running own-label brands, partner brands, and a field sales force under the IB group. The business reaches 9000+ independent retailers and national accounts through online retailer portal and field sales representatives. But its digital backbone hadn’t kept pace: the outdated retailer portal was so difficult to use that customers routinely abandoned it for phone and email orders, and field sales reps had a failing digital tool to capture leads or place orders in store. In 2023, Net Solutions engineered a full architectural overhaul, migrating World of Sweets from Magento Open Source to Adobe Commerce, layering in a headless CMS, and shipping an offline-capable mobile app for reps and retailers. The result: platform-transacted order volume climbed 6x in a year, number of retailers onboarded grew 4x, and digital is now firmly established as the primary ordering channel.
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Growth in platform-transacted order volume
Increase in retail stores onboarded
Revenue growth after the overhaul
Increase in Average Order Value
Most replatforming stories start with a company that has no online channel. This one starts with a company that had one and could not get its customers onto it.
World of Sweets ran a retailer portal on Magento Open Source. It worked, in the narrow sense that orders placed through it were processed. But store owners found it slow and awkward enough to go around it. They phoned their orders in, or emailed them. Somebody at head office rekeyed each one by hand, with the error rate and the delay that hand-rekeying always brings. The portal was not failing loudly. It was failing quietly, by being easier to avoid than to use.
The field sales team had the same problem from the other side. Representatives calling on independent stores had no shared record of what a customer had last discussed, no way to log a new lead against an account, and no way to place an order on a retailer’s behalf while standing in the shop. A good part of the territory they covered had unreliable mobile coverage, so any tool that assumed a live connection stopped working at precisely the moment the sales conversation was happening.
Net Solutions ran an Agile transformation grounded in field observation rather than assumption, mapping exactly where sales reps and retailers were failing to complete tasks, not just auditing the tech stack. From there, we built a phased technology roadmap sized for high-volume B2B transactions, with a hard requirement: keep the existing digital ecosystem live and stable throughout, so the business never lost an order to its own migration.
Five pieces of work, sequenced so the existing estate stayed live throughout.
We migrated the entire operation from Magento Community to Adobe Commerce, giving World of Sweets the enterprise-grade backend it needed for inventory management, integrated reporting, and high-traffic order processing.
We integrated Hygraph as a headless CMS, decoupling content from the storefront so the marketing team could push synchronized product updates, tailored content models, and promotional banners across the website, mobile app, and internal portals simultaneously, with granular role-based access controls and versioning history to keep the publishing workflow auditable, without developer involvement.
We built a custom React Native app that lets retailers and field reps build, edit, and save orders completely offline, auto-syncing to the central system the moment connectivity returns, eliminating the connectivity roadblock that had been stalling field orders.
A dedicated portal gives the sales team a single dashboard to track performance, capture new leads, and run outreach, turning fragmented field workflows into a centralized, measurable process.
We integrated Checkout.com for secure, multi-currency payment processing and fraud protection, and executed a full UX redesign to carry the new World of Sweets brand identity consistently across the digital estate.
Retailers migrated off manual ordering and onto the digital portal at scale: platform-transacted volume grew 6x against its pre-overhaul baseline, and annual order volume climbed roughly fourfold as orders that had been arriving by phone and email began arriving as data instead. Digital solidified as the primary ordering channel, the outcome the original portal was supposed to deliver and never did.
The growth built in stages: active stores using the platform were already up 2x, from 3,000+ to 6,000+, in the early months of adoption, before compounding further as the rest of the customer base came online. By 2026, the active retailers and stores have grown 3x, a direct validation of the new UX and the offline capabilities that let reps and retailers order regardless of network connectivity.
Average Order Value climbed steadily rather than in one jump. An early lift showed that customers with a searchable catalogue and an editable basket were already ordering more per visit than buyers reading a line item down a phone; that lift compounded to a 20% increase in AOV as the buying experience matured, confirming the pattern held rather than faded.
Peak concurrent users increased by 40% while maintaining consistent application performance; an important achievement for a business with pronounced seasonal demand. Under load testing on the new architecture, with an average basket size of 50 products, add-to-cart response time was reduced by 52% (from 2,150 ms to 1,025 ms), while promotion details loading time dropped by 79% (from 8,680 ms to 1,800 ms), providing the scalability and performance headroom needed to support continued business growth.
The Hygraph integration cut time-to-market for digital campaigns by centralizing content updates across every channel from one place, while the offline, Firebase-backed app eliminated connectivity-based order delays for field teams working in remote areas, turning the app into a tool reps could actually rely on rather than one they had to work around.
Three things made the difference, and none of them is the platform choice.
Offline-first was treated as a requirement rather than a nice-to-have. The reason the previous portal lost to the telephone was not that the telephone was better; it was that the telephone worked in a shop with one bar of signal and the portal did not. Fix that, and the rest of the argument for digital ordering makes itself.
The migration ran against a live estate serving tens of thousands of weekly customers, with no lost orders and no downtime. Nobody in the business had to accept a dark period, which is usually the reason replatforming projects get postponed for another year.
The content layer was decoupled through Hygraph so that publishing stopped being an engineering ticket, with one update reaching the website, mobile app, and internal portals at once, backed by the access controls and audit trail a conglomerate-scale business needs. That is invisible in a results table, and it is the difference between a platform the marketing team uses and one they route around.
Momentum didn’t stop at launch. Platform adoption kept compounding well past go-live, reflecting continued collaboration between our team and World of Sweets’ business.
World of Sweets’ transformation shows what happens when a B2B platform is built around how reps and retailers actually work in the field, not just how a spec sheet says they should. Let’s talk about what a similar overhaul could do for your business.
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