Problem

A global retailer with a growing multi-million-dollar online business recognized that the future customer experience needed to embrace a digital-first approach to unify the entire brand to service the customer expectations.  At the core of the digital commerce systems was an antiquated infrastructure that had grown beyond its ability to scale and had integration challenges that were costly to continue maintaining.  With industry tends indicating that customer purchase behaviors were continuing to shift to digital-first offerings, a strategic move for the brand was to pursue a new foundation for the eCommerce channel that would support longer-term scaled growth as well as flexible integrations with all other systems across the company.

Solution

As easily as enterprise eCommerce initiatives can become massive in scope, our first step was to begin an Understand phase, a process where we learned from subject matter experts, hosted user focus groups and actually worked with the various customer systems to learn the process and gain a deep understanding of our users’ pain points in all areas of the eCommerce enterprise. The Understand phase resulted in a multi-phased plan to select a new eCommerce vendor, design concepts for a new online shopping experience, and ensuring critical feature parity for major integrations that existed on the prior system.  A strong transition plan was also necessary for decommissioning the old site and retaining valuable customer data during the migration.

Systems integrated across the enterprise included:

• Customer Relationship Management
• Order Management
• ERP Inventory and Finance Systems
• Store Operations Backoffice and Omnichannel Suite
• Business Intelligence and Analytics

Result

As a result of this initiative, the retailer experienced the following:

• Reliability and Uptime - move to cloud-based infrastructure provides the scale, uptime, and confidence for live updates and deployments through peak seasons commanding volumes over twice the load of prior years.
• Flexible Platform for Integrations - with open-source technology and a service-oriented architecture, future integrations and expansions are straight forward and completed at twice the pace of prior projects.
• Core Foundation Established for Unified Commerce Vision - prior complications can now be overcome with a flexible core infrastructure that can serve as a primary integration point for all digital customer experiences across all channels.

The new eCommerce platform implementation has become a key component for multiple iterations of improvements towards personalization efforts as well as unifying all the channels on a common flexible architecture.