Medion: Unified Customer Identity Across European Markets

The Challenge

Medion sells laptops, TVs, smart home devices, and accessories across five European markets — Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Each country had its own online store. Each store had its own customer database. And none of them talked to each other.

A customer who bought a laptop in Germany and later ordered accessories from the Austrian store was two different people in Medion’s systems. No shared login. No shared purchase history. No way for customer service to see the full picture.

The problems ran deeper than inconvenience:

• Fragmented identity: Over 2.8 million customer accounts spread across five separate databases. Thousands of duplicates across markets. No single source of truth.
• Inconsistent consent management: Each storefront had its own cookie banner and privacy settings. Some markets collected consent granularly. Others used a single checkbox. GDPR compliance depended on which country’s developer had built the form.
• Incomplete customer profiles: Registration forms asked for everything upfront — name, address, phone, preferences. Most customers abandoned the form or filled in garbage data. Average profile completeness sat at 42%.
• No cross-market segmentation: Marketing teams in each country worked in isolation. A campaign targeting “customers who bought a TV in the last 6 months” could only reach one market at a time. No way to build segments across borders.

Medion needed one identity system for all markets. Clean, compliant, and connected to their commerce platform.

The Approach

We deployed SAP Customer Data Cloud (CDC) as the central identity and consent layer across all five storefronts, integrated with Medion’s existing SAP Commerce Cloud installation. The project ran in three phases over twelve weeks.

Phase 1: Centralised Identity and Single Sign-On (Weeks 1–4)

We set up SAP CDC as the single identity provider for all five markets. Every storefront was connected to one shared customer identity pool.

The first step was migrating 2.8 million existing accounts. We wrote a deduplication pipeline that matched records by email address, then by name-plus-address combinations. Where conflicts existed — different addresses, different consent states — we kept the most recent record and flagged discrepancies for manual review. The migration ran over two weekends with zero customer-facing downtime.

After migration, customers could sign in once and access any Medion store across Europe. We implemented Social Login (Google, Apple, Facebook) alongside traditional email/password registration to reduce friction. Account creation dropped from five form fields to two clicks.

Phase 2: GDPR-Compliant Consent Management (Weeks 5–8)

Consent was the hardest part. Five markets, three languages, two legal frameworks (GDPR for all, plus local e-privacy directives in the Netherlands and Belgium). The old setup was a patchwork — different consent categories, different opt-in mechanisms, different storage formats.

We built a unified consent schema in SAP CDC with granular purposes: marketing email, marketing SMS, personalised advertising, third-party data sharing, and analytics. Each purpose has its own opt-in/opt-out toggle, its own legal basis reference, and a full audit trail.

The consent centre is embedded in every storefront with localised language and legal text. When regulations change in one market, we update the consent configuration centrally. No code deployment needed.

We also back-filled historical consent records. Where existing opt-ins met GDPR standards, we preserved them. Where they didn’t — and roughly 18% fell short — we triggered re-consent flows for affected customers on their next login.

Phase 3: Progressive Profiling and Commerce Integration (Weeks 9–12)

Instead of asking customers for everything at registration, we implemented progressive profiling. The system collects data gradually, based on context and behaviour.

At registration: just email and password. After the first purchase: delivery address (which the customer has to provide anyway). After the third visit: a short preference survey embedded in the account page. After a support interaction: device and product preferences, pre-filled from purchase history.

Each data point feeds into the customer’s CDC profile and flows through to SAP Commerce Cloud for personalisation — product recommendations, localised promotions, and pre-filled forms at checkout.

We built the integration layer between CDC and Commerce Cloud using SAP CDC’s event webhooks. When a profile is updated or a consent changes, the commerce platform reflects it within seconds. No batch jobs, no nightly syncs.

The Results

Three months after go-live, the numbers were clear.

• Five markets, one identity. All 2.8 million customer accounts consolidated into a single identity pool. Duplicates eliminated. Customer service agents see the full cross-market history in one screen.
• 100% GDPR-compliant consent across all markets. Every customer has granular, auditable consent records. The 18% gap from the legacy system was closed through re-consent flows. Consent data is structured, exportable, and legally defensible.
• Profile completeness up 30%. Progressive profiling moved the average from 42% to 55% within three months — without annoying customers with long forms. The data quality improved because customers provided real information in context, not placeholder text at registration.
• Cross-market segmentation live. Marketing teams can now build audience segments across all five markets. The first cross-border campaign — a Black Friday promotion targeting TV buyers — reached 340% more customers than any single-market campaign before.
• Single sign-on adoption at 89%. Within three months, 89% of returning customers used SSO to access multiple storefronts. Support ticket volume for login issues dropped by 60%.

Medion’s five storefronts now share one customer identity. The data is clean, the consent is solid, and marketing finally sees the full European picture. No more silos, no more guesswork.