Ecommerce Platform Replacement
A global retailer with an antiquated ecommerce platform wanted to establish a digital-first omnichannel foundation allowing cloud-based flexible commerce functionality to power future investments.
The Problem
A global retailer with a growing multi-million-dollar online business recognized that their customer experience needed to embrace a digital-first approach to unify the entire brand and keep up with customer expectations. At the core of the digital commerce systems, was an antiquated infrastructure that had grown beyond its ability to scale and involved integration challenges that were costly to continue maintaining. With industry trends 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.
The Solution
Recognizing that enterprise ecommerce initiatives can become massive in scope, our first step was to begin an Understand phase. In this process, we learned from subject matter experts, hosted user focus groups, and worked directly 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 process resulted in a multi-phased plan to select a new ecommerce vendor and design concepts for a new online shopping experience. We also spent focused time ensuring there was critical feature parity for major integrations that existed on the prior system. A strong transition plan was also necessary to decommission the old site and retain 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
The Result
As a result of this initiative, the retailer experienced the following:
- Reliability and Uptime - Moving to a cloud-based infrastructure provides the scale, uptime, and confidence for live updates and deployments even during peak seasons when volumes can rise 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 straightforward and completed at twice the pace of prior projects.
- Core Foundation Established for Unified Commerce Vision – The retailer was able to overcome prior complications 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 the unification of all channels on a common flexible architecture.
