Major Consumer Appliance Brand

Overview

A leading and innovative global consumer appliance brand was being held back with a collection of technology services that it had outgrown. With a worldwide network of sales representatives and growing sales through separate eCommerce storefronts in several countries, the need to restructure into a new technology solution was critical. Of course, the replatforming process would have to be completed quickly, with an internal team, while continuing to run day-to-day operations on the existing storefronts.

Going beyond engineering and building an online storefront, the company generates a significant amount of content for its customers. A loyal fan base of customers that takes advantage of this content in their daily kitchen routines, served up by a headless content management system, meant that content and commerce would need to be tightly integrated.

Challenges

A major global consumer appliance company realizes they need to explore eCommerce platform options for a more robust, flexible, and API-driven commerce service. Adding another disconnected system and platform into the technology mix wasn’t going to be an option. Between connecting to the backend, existing web storefronts, and the headless content management system, Contentful, integration was key.

Growing Demands & Disconnected Systems

Any growing business is going to have several systems, platforms and services that need to seamlessly connect to deliver for the business and its customers. With a customer-facing website powered by one content management system and a separate eCommerce system, the solution path would rely on a new platform that could easily be customized for the business’s unique requirements but also connect with the existing legacy CMS and commerce services. The company’s team knew that to make significant progress, they would need to move step-by-step, with a new eCommerce platform leading the way.

Customer Experience

For this rapidly growing business, ensuring continued growth with new sales representatives easily onboarding through the initial purchase and commerce experience was a critical factor. Reducing friction as much as possible within the process while custom designing an intuitive and user-friendly customer experience would be a critical solution to develop as a team.

Searching for Long Term Solution

The business needed to move toward a long-term commerce solution that would provide a critical path forward, solve for issues of scale, be adaptable to their unique business model and continue to integrate with the rest of their systems – backend, storefront, content and related services.

A new eCommerce platform would serve as a hub for the technology stack and connect to the existing business services while being flexible to support future updates.

Solution

“Everything [Ultra] said their platform could do it did. There were no surprises.”

With the move to Ultra Commerce, this global consumer appliance company now has the commerce flexibility to control and manage the unique aspects of its business with its own development team. The features and functionality of a complete commerce platform are combined with the ability to adapt and develop with full-coverage API and headless commerce capabilities.

• Headless commerce and dynamic full coverage API that even supports customizations to the data model
• Future-proof setup and support for a dynamic business model
• Integrated and connected to the business’s content management system (Contentful and WordPress) and storefront
• Multi-language storefront powered by Ultra Commerce and Contentful

Improved Registration & Onboarding

The flexibility of the headless commerce engine allowed for customized eCommerce registration process and onboarding programs for new sales representatives allows for seamless registration and introduction into the eCommerce storefront.

Several new checkout paths deliver a personalized shopping and checkout experience to these new high value customers and serve to introduce the brand.

The Ultra Commerce API is used for order transactions, sales rep account management, parent/child accounts and payments with direct payment provider integration.

Ultra Commerce provided everything they required through API with exceptional support to get their team up and running and where they need to be.

Hear it directly from the client:

“[Ultra] always wanted to be a part of our solution, so they put their tech architect on our team to learn the daily context of our company issues and challenges. This led to a great, cohesive solution where Ultra felt like a conduit between teams. We felt really, really well taken care of, which made the key difference in the success of this project. [Ultra] were really committed to our success and it showed.”