Large US Retailer – Saving Time and Money with a Content Supply Chain Tech Stack
Optimizing a Leading Retailer’s Customer-centric Commerce Experience
Leading Furniture Retailer
A furniture retailer in the Northeast was looking to develop their omnichannel experience. The company needed an industry-leading digital shopping model that seamlessly complemented and enhanced their in-store experience, setting them apart from competitors.
They partnered with Rightpoint to launch a new digital experience, built on Optimizely, to deliver a truly customer-centric e-commerce storefront and modernize the online furniture shopping experience.
Services
Starting with a Strategy
Today’s customers treat a company’s website like its front door—beginning their shopping journey with online discovery. It was critical for the website experience to provide consumers with an intuitive, personalized, and quick way to explore products, learn about services, and execute frictionless transactions.
Prior to the pandemic, the retailer had begun revamping their digital presence. When stores began closing due to pandemic lockdowns and e-commerce took on greater responsibility for overall business health, the company doubled down on their initial vision. They selected Optimizely DXP with Commerce Cloud for its ability to deliver an integrated content and commerce experience, and they worked with Rightpoint, an Optimizely Premier Platinum partner, for digital experience design, development, and end-to-end commerce integration.
They tasked the Rightpoint team with increasing conversion, order size, and loyalty by reinventing the e-commerce shopping experience and utilizing the features available in Optimizely’s DXP:
Targets included:
Modernizing the e-commerce experience
Doubling conversion rates by reducing funnel drop-offs
Unifying the omni-channel brand by connecting the in-store experience online
Showcasing their large network of physical stores and two-day delivery, across all customer journey touchpoints
Quickly and easily directing users to the right product via quality structured content, wayfinding, and search
Tailored online and in-store experiences for defined customer segments and use cases.
The ultimate goal of what became the largest Optimizely Commerce implementation in North America was to increase loyalty, checkouts, and order size by taking full advantage of the extensive Optimizely Content & Commerce functionality.
Work
Working Through a Pandemic
The website redesign was challenging on two key fronts: scale and complexity. In addition, the team had to contend with complications from the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the project kicked off, the website’s primary role was to drive foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar stores. But as lockdowns forced retail stores to temporarily close their doors, daily traffic to the website tripled, which meant that the new site must support a dramatic increase in the number of visitors. And because the existing site had never been responsible for guiding customers through the entire shopping journey, it needed to deliver a more sophisticated and customer-centric experience across all stages of the research, consideration, and purchase journey.
Building for Unprecedented Scale
Volume became a major hurdle: Each day, hundreds of thousands of users accessed the site, placing hundreds (sometimes thousands) of individual orders. In addition to customer activity, the website needed to push tens of thousands of SKU updates daily while maintaining a highly effective wayfinding and search experience. This volume had never been seen before, and the team knew that their promise to their customers was reliant on rising to this demand.
Managing Layers of Complexity
The project included a tremendous amount of complexity around every aspect of the website, including its associated processes. For example, the checkout sequence alone had to handle a variety of relational considerations and variables such as:
Authenticated versus guest
Multiple shipments and delivery scheduling
Multiple payment types (credit card, finance accounts, gift cards, etc)
Multiple warranty systems
Management of recycling fees in Rhode Island and Connecticut
A discount pricing module that runs independent of the Optimizely promotion engine
The final checkout solution was built as a single-page app using React and Redux, which included all of Optimizely’s personalization and visitor intelligence benefits.
The project had three phases:
Discovery
The initial discovery phase covered overall strategy, experience visioning, and business and technical requirements. The team gathered an in-depth understanding of the retailer’s business vision and the diverse audiences it serves by conducting heuristic, competitive and user research across 116 pages and 50 competitors. They visited stores to observe shopping behavior, interviewed furniture consultants, audited the current digital experience, and studied the brand to deliver a holistic omnichannel commerce strategy with an unsurpassed customer experience.
Design
The primary aim of the branding and experience design phase was to modernize and simplify the customer experience. Work in this phase included development of:
Visual Brand and Concepting
Experience Design
Scalable Design System
Rightpoint’s Design System has enabled new feature development on the site by providing a clear system to follow, easy onboarding for new teammates, and clear patterns for developers to follow. Site users are now able to utilize the company’s new "See it in Store" feature across every step of the customer journey, providing simpler ways for customers to shop by style/look and more connections between the in-store and online shopping experiences. The new site also introduces “Collections” to serve up visually similar products to encourage upselling and cross-selling.
Development
The team executed a full-suite implementation of the Optimizely DXP including a hybrid-headless React front end, multiple integrations with external systems and a robust ETL architecture. Rightpoint worked closely with their IT team, collaborating remotely from their respective offices.
Outcomes
By combining Rightpoint’s experience expertise with Optimizely’s powerful platform, the team delivered a completely reimagined website experience that offers consumers a modern, 360-degree approach to interacting with the brand. In fact, the new digital experience has raised the bar for their in-store, digitally enabled ambitions.
Our Contributions
Capabilities
Optimizely Commerce Solutions
Customer Experience
Concept Prototyping
Persona & Journey Development
Product & Concept Testing
Experience Design
Experience Mapping
Information Architecture
Visual Design
Our Contributions
Technology
Optimizely DXP Commerce Cloud
Optimizely Personalized Search & Navigation
Optimizely Product Recommendations
React
Redux
Azure Functions
Azure DevOps
Adobe DAM
