The shop behind the counter

Ceres Pharma is a European group in women’s & family health. With more than 500 people, it develops, produces and distributes medicines, medical devices, food supplements and cosmetics, under its own brands and third-party brands.

Behind that range sits a long list of brands, from Bioradix and Etixx to Omron and Naïf. For the pharmacies and retailers that distribute them, we didn’t build a classic webshop but a private ordering portal: you log in with your customer account and immediately see the brands, prices and discounts that apply to you. Consumers see nothing. As it should be, behind the counter.

In B2B, every customer has a story. A pharmacy chain has different terms from an independent pharmacist. A sports shop only sells Etixx. And every sales rep has at least one customer with ‘a special little arrangement’. In a spreadsheet that quickly becomes a tangle. In Ceres Orders, they’re rules.

Those rules live on three levels: per brand, per customer group and per customer. Volume discounts, a fixed percentage, a net price, free delivery above an amount, which brands someone gets to see: every rule sits at the level where it belongs. And they work together, so a customer agreement simply stacks on top of the brand’s volume discount.

For the Ceres Pharma team, everything is in one place, filterable by level. What’s running, what’s scheduled, what has expired? No digging through emails and notes, no discount quietly running on because nobody switched it off.

Buy twelve boxes of Primalair, get two Primalair Kids for free. Deals like that are gold for a brand, and a nightmare when someone has to apply them by hand to every order. Or forgets to.

In Ceres Orders you build a bundle deal like a sentence: for whom, if what’s in the basket, then which benefit, and when. Pick a customer for a test order and you immediately see what they’ll see, before you hit save. The system also shows whether the deal clashes with another rule. Better the software notices than the accountants.

All that logic stays behind the scenes. The pharmacist sees their own prices per volume tier, the agreement that applies to them and the free product that appears in the basket by itself. With a nudge at the right moment: four more boxes and you reach the next tier. Helpful or commercial? A bit of both. That’s fine, it’s a shop.

A completed order is saved straight away as a structured order, with every discount and every free product as a separate line, ready to be imported for processing. Both the customer and Ceres Pharma get an email confirmation. The whole platform is bilingual, in Dutch and French, and works on every screen.

Fewer phone calls, less retyping, fewer ‘was that 12 or 21 boxes, and with which discount?’ moments.

Ceres Orders is one of the brand sites we build for Ceres Pharma. Each with its own face, all on the same foundation. The whole system:

Ceres Pharma · CalxPlus · Stresspure · Bioradix · Primrose · Silix · nosko (2021) · noskobaby.com