With growing sales and an expanding customer base spanning North America and Europe, the athleisure retailer recognized that their 10-year-old legacy commerce platform was not fit to support their 3x growth aspiration. Customers experienced friction points due to downtime and the inability of the platform to process requests efficiently, as well as fragmented journeys and delays during peak season. While modernization of their business processes and customer experience delivery were necessary, upgrading the existing platform proved to be extremely expensive and time-consuming. Consequently, they acknowledged the need for an entirely new future-ready ecommerce platform.

Our client was looking for a partner with a good mix of technical prowess, e-commerce functional expertise and deep knowledge of the retail business landscape. Their aim was to identify a platform that could meet the growth needs across all their retail channels. The key platform requirements included the ability to significantly improve customer experiences and facilitate the purchase of products when, where and how each customer wants. It was essential that the platform was secure, consistent and built on enterprise microservices using low-code to allow those with basic coding knowledge to add to the platform. Furthermore, the company required validation of their strategy as well as the technology architecture that would drive digital transformation for web, mobile, customer support and retail store point-of-sale integration.

Our approach involved an extensive investigation to arrive at the right solution, beginning with more than 20 cross-functional discovery workshops to comprehend consumer purchase journeys, expected functional capabilities and architectural guiding principles. Subsequently, we performed an in-depth industry trend analysis and a thorough assessment to arrive at a broad list of ten industry-leading product vendors. Employing our comprehensive eCommerce platform evaluation framework, we produced a detailed RFI/RFP process, which identified the best fit among them. The evaluation process assisted in narrowing the field down to two potential vendors, before finally arriving at the best-of-breed technology platform with a MACH (Microservices, API First, Cloud Native and Headless Platforms) architecture. The due diligence process included a six-week proof of concept with consumer-specific use cases and an omnichannel maturity assessment. Upon reaching our final recommendation, we further defined the scope of the minimum viable product and detailed a three-to-five-year roadmap. Additionally, we defined a new architecture to support current and future channels and touchpoints.

The selected technology platform is based on state-of-the-art headless commerce technology. It gives our client a competitive edge by enabling speed, scalability and a seamless user experience. The new technology platform delivers the infrastructural strength to achieve the desired 3x growth in online B2C sales, while creating a streamlined omni experience for consumers, customer service agents and store associates. Moreover, this ecommerce platform has the capability to optimize operational costs and reduce checkout friction and pain point interactions by 50%, while simultaneously doubling customer sentiment scores. In a win-win situation reflecting client satisfaction and confidence, we have been retained to not only implement and deploy the selected platform but also act as the consulting partner for a similar journey to accelerate platform modernization in their B2B business. While the journey toward tripling sales is in the nascent stages, they are off to a strong start on the right foundation.