Vondels is a design-led gifting brand based in Amsterdam, best known for their handcrafted Christmas ornaments and broader gift collection sold across 46 countries. The business runs on B2B, built around a network of showrooms, sales agents, and a seasonal preorder cycle. Buyers commit to next season's collection months ahead of launch while topping up the current one, often in the same session. But Vondels' legacy platform forced those two order types into separate webshops, dragging down sales and leaving the team unable to tailor the buyer experience. That's when Vondels turned to Shopify, to bring in-stock and preorders into a single storefront built for the way B2B buyers actually shop.
Since launching Shopify B2B, Vondels has achieved:
- 14% increase in B2B sales, compared to the previous year
- 2 separate B2B webshops merged into 1 unified storefront
- A near-silent support inbox
Challenge: A Fragmented B2B Experience That Cost Sales
For years, Vondels split their B2B business across two webshops. One handled current-season in-stock orders. The other handled future-season preorders. Customers had to pick which shop to enter at the start of every visit, and switch between them to compare or combine. It was meant to bring clarity. Instead, it cost sales. "Buyers came in for a stock order and didn't know we had new products or that the new preorder season was online," says Dewi Dekker, Ecommerce Manager.
The fragmentation was just as painful inside the company. Any front-end change to the buyer experience impacted both shops at once, so tailoring the preorder journey meant compromising on the in-stock one, and vice versa. And the maintenance load only grew. "My day to day work was more troubleshooting than actually optimizing," says Dewi.
The turning point came at a trade show. Vondels' founders saw another business running stock and preorders on one website, and immediately knew what they were leaving on the table. They brought the question back to the company's annual review: is this platform still working for Vondels?
Solution: A Unified Storefront With Native + Custom Workflows
Vondels was already working with Good Karma, an ecommerce agency based in the Netherlands, on a brand refresh. When Good Karma recommended Shopify B2B as the foundation, the team had a fair question. Could a platform best known for B2C really handle the requirements of a business that was overwhelmingly B2B?
At first, we weren't sure if Shopify could handle our complex B2B requirements. The look and feel would be great, but on the back end, could we do everything we needed? The answer was yes.
Most of what they needed was handled by Shopify's native B2B feature set. Catalogs controlled the products, their availability, and the pricing, including license-restricted collections that could only ship to specific countries. Shopify Markets handled currency and routed buyers to the right catalog based on location and their assigned buying group. The theme editor gave the team something they hadn't had before: from a single store, they could refresh the preorder or stock experience independently, or spin up seasonal themes, without filing a developer ticket.
And Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, became what Natasja called "an extra team member." Pulling business data on demand, and handling reporting requests that used to interrupt the team's day.
Extending the Shopify Platform
Where out-of-the-box solutions couldn't meet Vondels' specific needs, Good Karma built custom workflows on top of Shopify. Two stood out: the preorder cart that had defined the old setup, and the custom middleware Good Karma built to integrate Exact Online and handle the complex flow of inventory.
Preorders
For Vondels and the rest of the seasonal gifting industry, preorders are critical to how the business runs. "Preorders are how we forecast and plan manufacturing. Without them, we can't get the collection ready in one batch," says Michelle Tak, Head of Wholesale at Vondels.
The same SKU now lives in two seasons at once: current at full price, and next season as a preorder. Every buyer session runs two carts in parallel, one for preorder and one for in-stock. Stock levels live in two inventory locations in Shopify, both synced from Exact Online. Preorder stock is held in a metafield that controls how each product appears on the storefront. And buyers can browse both seasons together, add to either cart, and check out each cart separately when ready.
ERP Integration
The second build runs entirely behind the scenes. Vondels' ERP, Exact Online, is the source of truth for inventory, tier pricing, customer records, and payment terms. Good Karma built a custom bidirectional middleware on DigitalOcean so the field mapping and workflow rules could be tailored to how Vondels actually operates.
At the heart of the build was the mapping itself: reconciling how Exact Online and Shopify each define and store the same data, while keeping API call volume inside Shopify's daily token budget. Tier pricing and seasonal discounts are defined in Exact Online and imported into Shopify B2B catalogs, where catalog-level discounts are applied and removed automatically as collections move from preorder to in-stock. Payment terms are handled through Shopify Functions, which serve the right terms based on cart contents, customer identity, and country.
You can literally integrate Shopify with any system you have, whether that's plug-and-play or a custom integration.
Results: A Clear Lift in B2B Sales Post-Launch
Vondels launched their new, unified store at Christmas World, the gifting industry's largest trade fair. Since then, they've seen sales increase by 14% compared to the year before, despite the webshop being closed for one month this year during the rollout.
With in-stock and preorder in a single storefront, buyers stopped placing a stock order while missing that new products or the next preorder season were online. Operations told the same story. The support tickets the old setup used to generate didn't follow Vondels to Shopify.
Our B2B sales support team used to be overloaded with critical issues coming in from the websites. But now it's silent, which is a good thing. Our customers just know what to do.
The quiet has translated into time. With the team freed from daily troubleshooting, Vondels is finally turning toward the growth work that had been on hold. "Our B2B business works so well now, and that actually gives us room to focus on improving B2C. The complexity lives within B2B, and we feel like we've reached a point where it's more stable than it's ever been," says Natasja.