Astrak Group

Astrak serves an exceptionally wide range of customers — from OEM manufacturers building original equipment to construction teams running large fleets, all the way down to farmers operating just a few machines. Many of these purchases are what CIO Stephen Cope calls a “distress purchase”: a machine is down, downtime is expensive, and buyers must find a compatible part immediately. That makes accuracy, speed, and service essential to Astrak’s business model, and reinforces why the company invests heavily in fast delivery, deep product expertise, and technology that minimizes customer disruption.

Expanding into the U.S. market

Stephen Cope, Astrak Group’s CIO, says that before the COVID-19 pandemic, many of Astrak’s customers still placed orders over the phone. But as with other industries, Astrak’s buyers – construction supervisors, parts procurement specialists, farmers – became accustomed to convenient online buying experiences in their personal lives during pandemic lockdowns. Customers’ expectations of fast, convenient online buying led Astrak to launch and expand digital experiences – and also opened up opportunities to expand into new markets and new geographies.

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The biggest, most promising market to fuel Astrak Group’s ambition to become the global leader in undercarriage parts was the United States. But launching into the U.S. came with considerations and concerns.

1. Astrak Group had no prior commerce initiatives in the U.S. and little knowledge about what would or wouldn’t work in the market. Relative to expansion throughout Europe, entering the American market felt like starting from scratch.
2. Astrak Group’s business requires world-class customer experience and super-fast delivery. That’s because Astrak Group’s products are what Stephen calls “a distress purchase. A machine is broken and the downtime is costing our customers’ money. They need to find a part 100% compatible for their machine, they need to purchase it right away, and they need it in their hands as soon as possible. Next day delivery, overnight shipping, processing orders fast – it’s what our customers need and what we deliver.”
3. The products that Astrak Group sells have demanding merchandising requirements. For one, parts in the undercarriage industry have different specifications according to the product application, the machine it fits on, and more. To scale into new markets and support vast, technical data, product data has to be decoupled. Also, to avoid SKU explosion, Astrak Group has application-based products – one SKU might fit hundreds of different applications, and each application might have a different specification. So, adding a single product can require adding 100 or more product pages to a storefront.
4. Expanding into the U.S. would mean merchandising and marketing using the dollar for the first time, introducing multi-geo and multi-currency pricing requirements.
5. Astrak Group has around 200 employees, and doesn’t have a huge team of commerce-dedicated developers or IT staffers. The company needed a commerce solution that is fast to launch, efficient to manage, and easy to use.
6. Astrak Group didn’t have the appetite for a full replatform and wanted a future-proof commerce solution that would scale over time and adjust to evolving market demands.

Astrak treated its U.S. launch as a real-world validation of the composable, API-first approach. Cope describes the rollout as “proof that the composable API-first approach actually worked” — the team launched quickly, adapted even faster, and learned how U.S. customers preferred to buy. These insights now serve as the blueprint for future geographic expansion: launch rapidly, gather real customer feedback, and iterate continuously to improve conversion and experience.

Opting for composable commerce

After weighing its unique requirements and strong commitment to exceptional commerce experiences, Astrak Group opted to power expansion into the U.S. market with a composable commerce solution.

Astrak Group favored composable commerce because it would get a site live in the U.S. fast while delivering on the company’s long term commerce ambitions of flexibility, scalability, and high performance. Composable commerce also enables Astrak Group, which has traditionally used Shopify to sell online, to move beyond the limitations of monolithic platforms, which typically organize product data statically, line-by-line and row-by-row in spreadsheets, making for cumbersome product management and difficulties scaling.

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“We’ve been held back by the way typical, out-of-the-box commerce providers handle item data and product data,” says Stephen. “In the undercarriage industry, products have different specifications according to the product application, the machine it fits on, and more. We needed to decouple item product data to improve our customer experience and grow our business in new and existing markets.”

Instead, with composable commerce, Astrak Group can access product management solutions that support decoupled product data, and other best-of-breed components that power extraordinary site experiences. The result is an overall commerce solution that fuels growth instead of stunting it.

“We opted for composable commerce because we needed a solution that is flexible and scalable,” says Stephen. “We wanted to access integrations with top vendors and use best-of-breed solutions. Most of all, we needed a commerce solution that grew with us instead of holding us back.”

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Also central to Astrak Group’s decision to opt for composable commerce was the future-proof nature of composable technology. Stephen says his team didn’t want to launch into a new market, customize for Astrak Group’s business needs, and then be forced to replatform years later. “As technology progresses and our business needs change, we can just swap in and out components – accessing far more revenue-driving power than with another architecture,” Stephen says.

Selecting Elastic Path as a differentiated, truly composable commerce solution

As Astrak Group looked for a commerce provider, it learned that just because a company calls its platform “composable” doesn’t make it true. In the end, the quest for a truly composable commerce solution led Astrak Group to select Elastic Path.

Astrak Group evaluated BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce (Magento), but didn’t feel that either offered true commerce, or business, flexibility. Magento, in particular, has a retrofitted headless architecture, which makes for design freedom on the frontend but a backend that is essentially monolithic. Stephen says that such an architecture would have been a burden for Astrak’s small team of developers, who would have had to learn new code and technology – greatly delaying the launch of a new site.

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In comparison, Elastic Path’s modular, composable, MACH-based architecture meant sparing Astrak Group’s developers weeks of coding and customizations. Stephen points to Elastic Path’s APIs as pivotal for Astrak Group’s small team of commerce developers.

“The key differentiator with Elastic Path has been the API capabilities. We can make changes to the frontend and backend without disrupting either,” Stephen says.

Also differentiating Elastic Path was the ability for Astrak Group to launch in the U.S. with improved commerce flexibility while maintaining elements of its commerce architecture that were working well and still power the company’s European sites. Astrak Group uses a NetSuite ERP for business management and automation, which is easily integrated with Elastic Path. Astrak Group also uses a software agency, McKenna Consultants, that Elastic Path has partnered with in the past. The result, Stephen says, is that selecting Elastic Path has meant securing high-performing commerce without business and technical disruption.

Using U.S. expansion to test and make gradual commerce improvements

Along with impressive metrics and site experiences, Astrak Group used U.S. expansion to cultivate a culture of testing, experimentation, and gradual, iterative commerce improvements.

Astrak treated its U.S. launch as a real-world validation of the composable, API-first approach. Cope describes the rollout as “proof that the composable API-first approach actually worked” — the team launched quickly, adapted even faster, and learned how U.S. customers preferred to buy. These insights now serve as the blueprint for future geographic expansion: launch rapidly, gather real customer feedback, and iterate continuously to improve conversion and experience.

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Ambitions of D2C-level experiences for B2B buyers across the globe

Building on its composable foundation, Astrak is now infusing AI into its digital and sales workflows — not to replace people, but to augment them. The team is developing AI models that behave like their best sales agents: scanning hundreds of CRM data points to highlight opportunities, risks, and price sensitivity. These models use simple visual indicators to guide pricing and customer engagement, helping teams make faster, smarter decisions while preserving the human relationships central to Astrak’s service model.

Astrak is also exploring AI-enabled product discovery to reduce errors in part selection — a critical need in a “distress purchase” environment where accuracy and speed are everything. Even achieving 90–95% confidence dramatically improves efficiency and empowers teams to spend more time solving customer problems rather than managing repetitive processes.

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However Astrak Group pursues further commerce innovation, they’re committed to doing it with Elastic Path, in large part because of the value of Elastic Path’s customer success team. And as they continue their journey toward AI-powered, intelligent commerce, Elastic Path’s API-first, MACH-based architecture provides the flexibility to plug emerging AI models directly into core commerce workflows — enabling innovation without replatforming or disrupting existing systems.

​​“Any time we’ve had an issue with development or questions about what to do next, we’ve been able to turn to Elastic Path and get answers fast. To us, Elastic Path customer support means total trust and real-time solutions. It’s the best customer service I’ve experienced or could imagine.”