Build ecommerce that fits around Garp

Why Garp companies need a clear ecommerce strategy

Garp is an ERP with strong heritage in fashion, distribution, and manufacturing. Companies running Garp have often built their processes around size, colour, and season structures that are handled deeply in the system. It's not a system you leave easily when ecommerce develops — doing so would mean rebuilding collection data, customer records, and supplier flows from the ground.

That means the question is not whether to keep Garp, but how ecommerce should be built around it. Many fashion brands and distributors running Garp sell to both resellers and direct to consumers. That places different demands on the platform, integration, and content — and those demands need to be clear before technology is chosen.

Nordic Web Team works platform-neutrally. We've delivered ecommerce against various ERPs and help you choose the platform and architecture that suits your Garp environment best — not the one easiest for us to deliver.

What Garp covers — and where ecommerce fits in

Garp has been developed since the 1980s and has its strongest position in fashion and textile companies in western Sweden. The system handles collections, size scales, colour variants, seasons, and supplier orders in a way that suits fashion flows. For distributors and manufacturers, it supports product structures, inventory handling, and B2B customer agreements.

What Garp doesn't do is act as a sales channel toward end customers. Product imagery, collection storytelling, customer journeys, and checkout flows sit outside the system's core. That's where an ecommerce platform comes in — as a complementary layer that surfaces Garp's data to customers in a format that suits the web.

For a B2B portal toward resellers, the requirements differ from a D2C store. Resellers need to place pre-orders per season, see their contract prices, check delivery status, and handle larger order lines. End consumers need inspiring collection environments, fast checkout, and clear delivery information. Many Garp companies need both — and in that case, both should be handled from the same data source but with different experiences on top.

Platform choice for Garp environments

We work with Norce, Shopware, Shopify, and Magento with Hyvä. All four can work against Garp, but they suit different situations.

Norce is a Nordic platform with strong handling of complex product structures, customer-group price lists, and B2B flows. For distributors who sell to resellers and want a platform that handles pre-orders, seasonal stock, and multi-country overview, Norce is often a natural fit.

Shopware is a European open-source platform that suits companies running both B2B and D2C in one setup without compromise. Strong content management makes fashion stories, campaigns, and collection pages easy for the marketing team to work with.

Shopify suits D2C brands that prioritise fast time-to-market and a modern frontend. For pure B2B with customer-specific price lists and advanced order flows, Shopify is more constrained — but for D2C it's a quick and operationally simple choice.

Magento with a Hyvä frontend gives maximum flexibility for companies with specific requirements. For fashion with complex attributes, both B2B and D2C in the same platform, and full control over the customer experience, it remains one of the strongest options.

Collection data and pricing logic — what makes Garp projects different

Two areas place higher demands on a Garp project than on a standard ecommerce build.

Collection data. A product in fashion isn't a SKU, it's a group of SKUs across sizes and colours. How that's displayed online — as a variant selector, as separate product pages, or as a gallery view — affects conversion significantly. It's a design decision that both the Garp structure and the ecommerce platform need to support.

Pricing logic toward resellers. B2B customers have contract prices, volume discounts, and seasonal agreements. These are managed deeply in Garp and must be exposed correctly in a logged-in B2B portal. We decide during architecture whether prices are pulled live from Garp or cached per customer group — the choice depends on how often prices change and how large the B2B volume is.

How the integration is built

The integration between Garp and the ecommerce platform is built through established partner solutions. What's moved is typically five data domains: article data with variants and attributes, stock levels per variant, customer records and price lists for B2B, orders in both directions, and status and delivery updates back to the customer. For companies with large collections, a PIM system may sit as a structured enrichment layer between Garp and the web.

The integration itself is one part of the delivery. Platform choice, collection data work, UX design, QA of every variant combination, and a phased launch belong with the integration. It's the whole that determines whether ecommerce delivers from day one.

What a typical project looks like

A Garp project starts with a mapping of your business model, collection structure, and B2B/D2C flows. From there we recommend platform and integration architecture. Discovery and architecture typically takes 2–4 weeks. The build and integration 8–16 weeks depending on catalogue size and whether both B2B and D2C are included. QA runs in parallel and intensifies in the final weeks. Launch is phased — we go live with a controlled segment first, monitor, then open up to the rest.

The result is an ecommerce setup that handles your fashion or distribution business with Garp as the operational backbone, without forcing you to replace what already works.