Adlibris, the largest online bookstore in the Nordics, has completed a major modernisation of its eCommerce platform. In just six months, Adlibris rebuilt its ecosystem from the ground up. Brink Commerce now powers the transactional core across all markets.
When Adlibris launched in 1997, buying a book online was entirely new. The company helped shape how the Nordics shop, building one of the region's earliest and most trusted eCommerce experiences at a time when digital retail was still finding its feet.
Nearly three decades later, Adlibris remains the largest online bookstore in the Nordics. The business now operates 25 physical stores across Sweden, 11 Adlibris Pocket outlets at airports and train stations, and a Campus bookstore concept serving university students. Distribution is managed through its own warehouse in Sweden, alongside a logistics partner in Finland. The company is part of the Bonnier Group, one of Europe's leading media and publishing groups.
Adlibris' mission has always been simple: to get more people reading, learning, and creating. While this is a mission that has never been more important than it is right now, the complexity of delivering on that promise at scale has grown.
Operating separate legal entities across Sweden and Finland, each with different currencies, tax rules, and localised expectations, meant Adlibris' previous platform was starting to hold them back. Simple operational tasks became painful projects. Every campaign launch or pricing tweak turned into a technical mystery that required too much time and operational energy.
Rather than settling for a slow, multi-year migration, the Adlibris team, led by CTO Magnus Nyström, chose to completely rewrite its stack in just six months. In the new ecosystem, Brink Commerce handles the transactional core, managing promotions, cart operations, and the checkout flow, while Algolia manages search, navigation, and merchandising across a catalogue of 15 million SKUs. The platform integrates seamlessly with Kustom for payments, Ingrid for deliveries, and Contentful for content management.
The result is a highly flexible, modular architecture built on modern principles. By utilising independent microservices and real-time events, Adlibris has created a system with no single point of lock-in, enabling continuous updates without risk. It is a best-of-breed setup that allows Adlibris to swap out individual components as easily as needed.
Magnus Nyström highlights how this new technical foundation shifts the speed of delivery for their teams:
"No one expected us to deliver a project of this scale in six months, but we did. We rebuilt our data structure, search, promotions, cart, and checkout from start to finish. Adlibris has been helping people find books for nearly thirty years, and our online experience needs to keep pace with modern customer expectations. Moving to a modular commerce platform enables our teams to work faster and build better experiences. We wanted a solid foundation that enables us to be ready for whatever comes next, and that is exactly what we have now."
For Adlibris CEO Ola Toresten, the priority remains centered on removing friction from the customer journey:
"Search, discovery, and checkout are where we win or lose the customer. By combining Algolia and Brink Commerce, we have replaced our old, slow systems with a modern platform that helps us iterate quickly and drive better business results."
Christian Zanders, COO of Brink Commerce, emphasizes that this successful transition shows what modular ecosystems can achieve at enterprise scale:
"Very few companies in the Nordics operate with the heritage and scale of Adlibris. Managing this complex transition across multiple markets, for both B2C and B2B customers with millions of products, is a massive achievement and a credit to the team at Adlibris. They have shown that the right technology can make companies faster, more scalable, and more profitable. Advanced technology should not create more complexity, it should eliminate it.”
Rebuilding an eCommerce ecosystem for 15 million books in six months is no light summer read. It takes deep technical coordination, clear focus, and a refusal to compromise on performance.
With the heavy lifting complete, Adlibris has turned the page on the constraints of legacy software. Their teams are no longer held back by rigid platform components or worrying about site performance during peak campaigns. Instead, they can focus on what they do best: connecting readers with their next favourite book.
Adlibris' mission remains exactly what it was in 1997. Only now, they have a fast, stable, and completely flexible foundation to scale it for the next thirty years, and beyond!
