US tires retailer: New SAP-based e-commerce platform with +30% traffic
SENLA facilitates the transition to a future-proof omnichannel solution for a major retailer.
Customer care for the win
According to a 2023 research by Deloitte, acquiring new clients is 5 times more expensive than keeping existing customers. Moreover, “62% of B2B customers have purchased more from a company after a good customer service experience”, and “loyal clients spend 67% more than new ones” as per another Deloitte feature.
Adopting the customer-centric strategy at the early stages has proved crucial in cementing the success of our Client, a large chain of car accessories stores operating throughout the United States. After decades of customer and employee care, they proudly take a spot among the top companies on such Forbes lists as Retail Customer-Centric Companies and Customer Experience All-Stars.
The secret to that is apparent: the customer is king! Furthermore, it’s the idea that employee care equals client care that helped our Client stand out and build a successful people-first business with never a down year nor a layoff.
This approach of tying a company’s success to the success of each individual within it struck a profound chord with SENLA’s system of beliefs. That’s why we were so honored to participate in a project for this Client.
The heart of SENLA's expertise
Our exceptional team is the force behind our success, with their expertise and dedication shining through in every project. Together, we create a better world through innovation, hard work, and commitment to excellence.
The need to go digital
What does it entitle to remain customer-oriented for a retail seller in the modern cyber era? The answer seems clear-cut: transfer the level of service customary to the visitors of brick-and-mortar stores to online shopping.
Our Client realized that nowadays people conduct much of their research online before ever coming into the stores. Data showed that over 80% of the Client’s customers began their experience with the company at their website.
“The way people shop, interact with brands, and request services has changed for good. Today when people make a major purchase… they do their homework. So you have to be engaged actively in the omnichannel experience.”
People today expect flexible, convenient experiences delivered on their terms and at the tip of their fingers. And they don’t take long to start complaining on social media if anything is amiss.
We at SENLA know too well from our experience that a retailer's website and the journey it offers have become critically important in recent years. Nowadays e-commerce has evolved into the primary sales channel and a crucial customer touch point.
Identifying the challenges
But how does a company achieve this transition? Training employees to be friendly and committed can be challenging, yet attainable. The real test lies in effectively conveying the same experience through an impassive screen.
It was clear that to migrate our Client’s exceptional patron care from conventional stores to an e-commerce platform, their website and the point-of-sale (POS) system would need to be completely re-hauled with next-generation technologies.
Simplifying and modernizing the website’s user interfaces while adding new-age features were essential during this project.
The Client also requested a recommendation system that would offer tailored product suggestions based on individual attributes and preferences, enhance customer confidence during the purchasing process, and nurture brand loyalty.
Finding the SAPlution
Our Client decided to go with SAP Commerce (formerly Hybris), an established cloud-based e-commerce platform. SAP Commerce delivers integrated web and mobile solutions, including product catalog, order management, payment processing, customer support, marketing, and analytics.
“We knew that with SAP Commerce we’d be able to consolidate the information we had throughout the company to create the ultimate customer experience.”
With it, the company's website would become more sophisticated yet user-centered and intuitive. As a result, our Client anticipated a 20% to 30% increase in organic traffic.
REACT’ing to the obstacles
But being one of the most beloved omnichannel e-commerce solutions, SAP Commerce still wasn’t ideal. Its server side used the JSP technology, which lacked efficiency in terms of both memory usage and processing time, provided few features, and took longer to render.
To modernize the website, the Client decided to outsource the development in order to optimize costs and tap into the global talent pool.
SENLA joined the multi-stage program of migrating the e-commerce platform to React, a more future-ready front-end technology.
React was chosen because it allowed for building top-quality, rich user interfaces and creating highly customizable and reusable components. Those in their turn would speed up the development process and would provide better code maintenance, being at the same time SEO-friendly.
The changes to the front end resulted in the necessity for us to redesign the back-end logic. We revised the data exchange between the website and the server using REST API so that it could be integrated with the new front-end technology.
Some of the other features SENLA’s experts worked on for the Client’s website include:
- User account page with a convenient displaying/editing of orders, as well as scheduling/rescheduling of car maintenance in an offline store.
- Personalized suggestions in the “My Account” section based on the product criteria the customer selected.
- Geolocation that depended on the user’s IP address. The website would now recommend the nearest physical store based on the customer’s location. We also added store search and filtering on Google Maps by state, distance, etc.
- Feature toggle in CMS that allowed for on-demand switching on/off various features for some or all users. For example, admins now could display/hide the completed orders feature in user profiles.
- A/B testing aimed at optimizing the site’s UX.
- Media optimization due to large amounts of outdated images on the old website. Some of them were not linked to products, and the rest had wrong formats.
“This was one of the most challenging tasks for us on this project due to the tight deadline and the vast amount of media we needed to process. We retrieved all the images from the storage, compared them against all the products, reformatted, resized, and uploaded them all back to the Amazon S3 bucket.
We also implemented a hot folder on the server that would automatically do this. As a guideline, it would use a specific naming convention for each media file based on product codes.”
The value: Success without disrupting the sales
We were aware that one of the pressing concerns for our Client was the necessity to shut the website down for maintenance. Customers continue using the store and buying products daily, so long out-of-service periods harm the business.
With React, it was possible to migrate the website gradually. Thanks to the micro frontend approach, a part of the platform still used the old technology, while we continued the upgrade work in tandem with new features development for 2+ years.
As a result, our collaboration allowed our Client to:
- Significantly improve website performance and exceed performance-based KPIs.
- Streamline and standardize customer data into a unified system, providing a comprehensive view of each customer.
- Enhance online experience with highly accurate and personalized product recommendations and high-end features.
And we were happy to help propel our Client’s organization into a more innovative and competitive digital landscape. Contact us if you need a similar solution.