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The experience of Directo, a major player in Australia’s B2B pharmacy market and one of Ekino Vietnam’s clients, shows the strategic value of investing in the right platform foundation.

The Challenge

Directo’s operation boasts a network of over 3,000 pharmacies linked to 180 suppliers. The scale of its supply chain, however, also means persistent operational difficulties: a given pharmacy would be in contact with one primary vendor and 50 direct ones, leading to a chaotic mess of calls, emails, and invoices.

The company wanted a digital platform that can unify these disconnected communications. The obstacles they faced, however, were overwhelming:

  • Fragmented Data: Unstructured data from suppliers required active manual standardization.
  • System Overload: The sheer volume of consolidated orders from pharmacy groups regularly overwhelmed the system, causing interface crashes.
  • Stagnant Visibility: The existing platform could not provide real-time, granular visibility into dynamic pricing and availability, based on complex variables like customer location and contract terms.
Directo challenge

The Solution

With support from Ekino Vietnam, Directo eventually managed to resolve these complexities by implementing OroCommerce. This would be the source of truth and a singular system that can natively run commerce, marketplace, and CRM capabilities. Notably, the built-in CRM centrally manages a master product catalog, mapping multiple supplier SKUs to a single, clean view for pharmacies.

For customers, OroCommerce enforces granular, customer-level visibility rules at the same time as it executes thousands of concurrent, supplier-specific promotions at scale.

For suppliers, the platform offers a dedicated portal to let them manage their own data, including product information, prices, and images. Inventory updates regularly enter the system through FTP and CSV, which are manually processed by a dedicated data team beforehand.

This integrated approach was a tangible, meaningful operational upgrade. On the company’s side, it avoids license sprawl and sync errors entirely, while ensuring that sales, service, and operations teams all work from the same consistent data record, eliminating the need for separate, disconnected systems.

Directo Solution

An Evolving, Flexible Infrastructure

Unexpectedly, the template laid by OroCommerce is found to be not only sustainable, but replicable. When Directo was asked to build a platform that can connect caregivers with pharmacies for a home care marketplace, they utilized OroCommerce’s multi-organization support to provide a completely distinct entity that has its own customers and catalog in the same instance. It was a testament to the robustness of the new OroCommerce-powered digital foundation.

Directo Solution

The Results

OroCommerce’s impact is most visible in terms of revenue: in 5 years, Directo had increased its revenue seven-fold, handling over 50,000 orders in 2025 alone that netted over $46 million in GMV. This is a far cry from its previous operation, which could only handle a small number of orders at best.

One of the strategy’s notable advantages is that it does not need more manpower, since the same three-person IT team continues to handle everything through OroCommerce. The platform takes up the bulk of heavy operations, while avoiding compounding technical debt that typically occurs with less unified infrastructure.

With this solid technical foundation, Directo can set their sight towards future growth rather than micromanaging back-office complications. Utilizing the very infrastructure that half the country’s pharmacies rely on, they can expand towards new verticals, growing their business and maintaining a solid foothold in the market.