650 releases since October 2021, on the same Magento platform
Since October 2021, we have published 650 releases to the webshop: an average of eleven a month. This keeps development moving at Maxima. As of 9 September 2026.
From customer service and purchasing to marketing and finance: Maxima employees bring us their own requests and reports. We hear what they need directly from the people who work with the webshop.
Since its launch in 2021, Maxima has completed four major Magento upgrades while continuing to expand the webshop. With every upgrade, we check that the existing features still work.
Maxima has supplied kitchen equipment to chefs, culinary professionals and resellers since 1975. In 2008 it added a line of its own: an affordable alternative to the big brands.
The old platform, Lightspeed, could not keep up with what the organisation needed. Dealers with their own price agreements, orders of fifty lines at a time, shipping costs that differ per country and per pallet, invoices on payment terms: every department ran into the same limit, and every request ended in the same answer.
Construction of the new webshop started in May 2021 on Magento 2.4.3. The catalogue, the category structure, the customers, the orders and the product reviews all came across from Lightspeed. On 27 October 2021 the store went live, followed by a final check before the old environment was switched off. What came after is what this case is about: five years in which those limits came down one by one.
Maxima serves hospitals, schools, shawarma places and Michelin-starred restaurants. Alongside that there is a network of dealers and resellers. Those two groups buy differently: different prices, different payment methods, different quantities. That difference does not sit in a separate portal but in the same store, behind the login.
Maxima serves international customers through one webshop with 49 language variants. They share the same platform, so an improvement to a shared page template can be applied across all variants.
2021 · build and launch
The webshop moves from Lightspeed to Magento, bringing its products, customers, orders and reviews with it. The new store launches in the autumn.
2022 · dealers and quotations in one webshop
Dealer accounts move across, and Maxima can import agreed prices and handle quotations. Sales serves dealers at their own prices through the same webshop as end customers.
2023 · a new storefront with Hyvä
The store gets a new storefront with Hyvä, covering the shop from the homepage and product pages to the cart and customer account.
2024 · automated checks for errors
Automated tests complement manual checks. They help detect errors in the webshop when changes and upgrades are made.
2025 · ongoing attention to speed and errors
Errors from the webshop are automatically reported to the team. Load times and fixing errors become a regular part of maintenance. Work on the new Hyvä checkout starts in June.
2026 · the new checkout tested
The new Hyvä checkout passes its technical checks in May. The work also includes requesting a quotation directly from the cart.
Since October 2021, we have published 650 releases to the webshop. Work has been delivered every month, from new features to improvements to existing ones.
The early years focused on moving from Lightspeed, the quotation system, large orders and the first language variants. Work then shifted towards shipping costs and carriers, invoicing and payment terms, ease of use and page speed.
These requests come from day-to-day work. A carrier is added, Maxima starts selling in another country or the finance team needs a different payment term. Alongside those changes, we keep the technology up to date so the webshop can grow with the business.
What defines this partnership is that Maxima is in it themselves. Not one contact person passing everything on, but people from customer service, purchasing, marketing and finance bringing their own requests and reports straight to us, in the same workspace where we pick them up. Every year since 2021, and still.
That saves a translation step, and above all it saves loss along the way. Whoever works with the orders every day knows exactly where it pinches and why. That request arrives here with screenshots attached, rather than as a summary of a summary. The conversation that follows is not about what was meant, but about how to solve it.
Maxima first reviews changes in a test version of the webshop. The department that requested a change tries it out to see whether it works as intended. We then carry out our technical checks before publishing the change.
Automated tests help us detect errors. We also keep monitoring the webshop after delivery: errors are automatically reported to the team and picked up as work.
Dreißig Minuten über Vorgehen, Machbarkeit und Budgetrichtung, inklusive der Antwort, dass du damit besser nicht anfängst.
What five years of development add up to: one store that serves every part of the business, from end customer to dealer and from sales to administration, refined on each of those points until it fits.
Dealer pricing, quotations and custom shipping rates need to keep working after a technical update. The more the webshop can do, the more there is to check during maintenance.
We saw this during the Magento upgrade in 2022. It took longer than planned because some extensions did not yet work with the new version. Since then, we have developed the maintenance process further with automated tests and a regular check before every upgrade. We address the problems we find individually.
This keeps existing features under review as new ones are added. Maxima has now completed four major Magento upgrades without rebuilding the webshop.
After logging in, a dealer sees his own prices, his own payment methods and his own part of the range. The visitor does not have to calculate or call to know what he pays. For Maxima it saves a second webshop: dealers and end customers work in the same environment.
A buyer who needs to order fifty lines pastes them instead of opening fifty product pages. The order arrives as one order rather than an email with an attachment someone has to retype.
Anyone who needs a price agreement turns the cart into a quotation request without starting over. On the sales side that request lands in the same order system as a normal order, with the lines already in it.
New copy is automatically translated through DeepL for the different language versions. Customers see the webshop in their own language, with the settings for their country.
A dishwasher on a pallet to Portugal is priced differently from a blender to Utrecht. The visitor sees the amount in the checkout instead of afterwards; Maxima does not have to send an additional charge. Work on this part continued through all five years, each time a country, a carrier or a rate was added.
Addresses the carrier does not reach, on the islands for instance, drop out in the checkout rather than in the warehouse. That prevents orders that have to be cancelled later.
Business customers can buy on invoice; the reminders go out automatically. For the Maxima back office it means payment terms do not have to be tracked by hand.
When a machine comes back as used stock, the store makes a copy of it with a fixed discount and lists it separately. The visitor gets a cheaper alternative to look at; Maxima does not have to create a product for it.
Without Vendic we would never have achieved a perfect PageSpeed score
Maxima
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