Digital Storefront for HR Resources Company

Overview

A long-established HR and management resources firm came to Ultra Commerce with a challenge to enable future growth at their company.

Clients have long used their products to gain better insight into personal traits, create strong teams and management organizations more effectively by driving more personal productivity and performance.

They needed to create more digital engagement with their traditional assessment products but with a new digital version. While, at the same time, creating a foundation and a platform to power future digital content and subscription products in the future.

Of course, that wasn’t the only complication, secure content and subscription wasn’t the only product type that would need to be sold. The storefront would have to support a combination of online digital products, physical goods and virtual products with a single view of the customer.

Finally, the company operates and manages several in-person live events requiring online ticket selling, group sales and event registration.

In order to continue to grow, the company knew that moving to a new digital commerce platform would create more opportunities and allow for better leverage of its resources and strengths to build additional revenue streams.

The company’s challenge would be to find the right platform that would offer both short-term and long-term technology solutions along with outstanding support. With a long history of success online, the business team was searching for a vendor that could provide support for where the company is headed and assist the internal team with the onboarding and commerce migration process.

A significant challenge for the company was to leverage its proprietary system and knowledge to create digital products and subscriptions that could drive revenue and bring in new users.

Challenges

Migrating from an existing commerce solution is never easy, especially with an existing platform built in-house, the task was to find a next-generation platform that would allow them to realize their future goals for the growth of the business.

Why move from an existing legacy application to a new service? As the company has grown and the platform has matured, finding and maintaining the home-built application will continue to be a challenge. Finding development resources, maintaining security, patching the application and continuing to keep the company on the cutting edge would require growing the internal team.

A more sustainable longer-term approach, delivered as a hosted solution, would allow for greater technical flexibility, less maintenance and a better storefront delivered with next-generation commerce features like subscription selling, content paywall support and support for selling to businesses in bulk.

Product Catalog

Beyond finding a long-term, more sustainable commerce solution, the team was looking to extend their existing selling capabilities to include additional types of products. Adding a more flexible product solution would allow extensions of existing products to include digital content and more.

Promotions & Affiliates

The company utilizes a network of affiliates who promote and offer unique pricing to their users when purchasing on their digital storefront.

The business management team would need to be able to migrate their existing affiliate and selling network into a new platform and match the expectations that those affiliates have for how those promotions would work.

Business Purchasing

Selling to corporate accounts can be challenging especially when delivering a digital product with restricted access – any new solution would require the use of voucher codes to connect users to an authorized account.

Customer Experience

Creating a more unified customer experience across the storefront required the integration of new features and connecting to the existing website.

It was also important to streamline and optimize the buying process to leverage inbound traffic and new visitors who convert from a free trial on the site into paying customers. The trial services are a key driver for the company utilizing that digital content asset and converting into new business is critical for future growth.

Future Enabled

Ultimately, the business and marketing team would need a single platform with the flexibility to provide a solution that enables their digital commerce growth today with support for the future – driving a new commerce experience and new selling opportunities.

Solutions

Creating The Migration

Making the transition from a custom legacy application to a new platform is never easy, but the company was fortunate to leverage the agility and import capabilities of the Ultra Commerce platform to efficiently connect the two systems, allowing the company to develop its own migration path and plan of action. Migrating to a new commerce platform requires that the company has a solid plan and tools to import, manage and sync the historical data.

A Single Platform for Digital Business

A single platform to manage the digital business for a seamless customer experience. Bring together all digital products, premium content and digital subscriptions into a single digital commerce platform with single sign-on to connect to internal legacy applications.

Subscription Commerce

Ultra Commerce has the integrations and subscription commerce capabilities that the company requires. Subscription selling, management and service in a single platform. With no limits on the number of active subscriptions, subscription products and the capability to share subscription access within a company account for group access –subscription selling can be integrated into all sales channels.

Promotion and Affiliate Selling

Through Ultra’s platform, the company is able to take advantage of a unique promotion capability that connects its affiliate marketing program with unique pricing and offers based on the referral. Any customer driven by the affiliate marketing program credits the affiliate with the sale and the Ultra Commerce Telligence reporting capabilities can be used to generate reporting on affiliate order referrals and conversion.

B2B Selling

Business purchasing is a key growth channel for the company as it expands into new products with Ultra Commerce. The sales and account team can use the platform’s B2B buying capabilities for quoting and quote management, customer segmentation, and corporate buying. With new business purchasing options, companies can purchase multiple licenses for their employees and distribute one-time-use voucher codes to allow access into the secure content portal.

Content-to-Commerce Integration

The company needed an agile integration with existing web properties and digital content on the website. In addition to the integration of content and commerce, the Ultra Commerce platform is connected to the internal system for customer access with one-time access codes – a two-way sync ensures that each system is up to date.

Why Ultra Commerce?

To succeed with moving a business to a new digital platform, migrating historical data and connecting the rest of the business technology stack you need a good partner, not just technology. Ultra Commerce was able to work directly with the company project team to understand the business and create a true partnership to enable long-term success for the company.

Selling Capabilities

Repackaging existing digital assets, subscriptions and content to create new products and upgrade the selling potential is a key future business growth channel for the company. The ability to create new revenue streams from new products, bundling products together or creating subscription products for digital content access or memberships. Ultra Commerce would allow the company to introduce new types of products and allow customers to purchase a single transaction.

Supported API with flexibility

The company understood that its business was unique and would require a commerce platform that would enhance its digital commerce business but would also be a partner with the rest of the internal technology stack. The Ultra Commerce API is not only full coverage but also supports customizations made during the implementation – any custom fields, unique data properties and more are included as part of the API scope.

Future Forward

Fully supporting the business where it is today, but delivering the capabilities and features that will enable the business to operate more efficiently and bring new digital products to make and scale for the future.