The challenge
HP had been building a global unified e-commerce platform on InterShop for several years, but the original implementation partner was struggling with quality, and the release cycle was so long that early design decisions were out of date by the time they shipped. Country offices began deciding they could not wait. HP China needed a live storefront for the mainland market in 2015 — in time to bridge the gap before the global platform arrived.
How we worked together
We assessed the InterShop-based option and proposed a different path: Magento Commerce on Alibaba Cloud. It fit HP China's requirements better, was more extensible, and came in at a fraction of the cost. A team of seven — UI, UX, development, and QA — came together for the initial build.
The first month was spent in workshops with HP China's operations, marketing, and sales leads. Requirements gathering and design ran in parallel, not in sequence. Once development began, we shipped on a continuous integration and continuous deployment cadence — moving from one feature release per month to multiple per week. HP's requirements moved fast; so did we.
The China site went live in November 2017, running in parallel with the legacy store. Session length, traffic, and conversion rate all outperformed the old platform. Within twelve months HP China had tripled to quadrupled its online revenue. In December 2018 HP retired the InterShop license entirely and made our platform the sole storefront.
Going global
The China success became HP's reference case internally, and country after country asked to be next. We built a unified Magento-based global platform and then layered region-specific customizations on top — localized payment rails, promotions, fulfillment, and after-sales integrations across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Europe.
The hardest technical problem was that every market had its own ERP and payment standards — JD.com and Digital China in the mainland, different systems elsewhere. HP's original plan was to contract a third-party integrator. We proposed instead extending Magento with a Webhook-based integration layer: build the standard once, and require each country's ERP partner to conform to it. That shifted the integration burden off HP and onto the vendors — and gave HP lasting control over its own data.
Outcome
HP Online Store won the 2019 Magento Imagine Excellence Award for "Best Global Commerce Expansion" — recognition presented to HP and our delivery team jointly at the Adobe ceremony. The platform now runs in more than fifteen countries. The team has grown from seven to over forty, and the partnership is in its eleventh year.
The recognition from Adobe was for HP, but every engineer in the room knew the award was a verdict on how the work got done.
Enterprise clients do not renew for a decade because of hourly rates. They renew because the team knows their business. Growing from 7 to 40+ on a single account is what the "10" layer of our 70/10/20 model is designed to make possible.