How Brands Transform Their Commerce Ecosystem in Fewer Than 90 Days with Acquia & Credera

Point. Click. Buy. Easy, right? Today, brands are on a mission to make digital commerce effortless for consumers as retailers and service providers across all industries face higher demand for digital-first commerce experiences. Online shopping and digital marketplaces are more popular than ever with today’s consumers. According to DigitalCommerce360, consumers spent nearly $4.29 trillion online in 2020, a 24.1% increase in spending compared to 2019. As shopping habits continue to trend toward digital channels, brands are building data-driven, personalized commerce experiences.

Yet, a successful digital commerce strategy requires much more than simply adding a shopping cart button and online catalog to your website. People today shop everywhere from direct-to-consumer subscription boxes to Instagram recommendations and streaming services. They want their buying experience to be immersive and tailored to their lifestyle. That’s why Acquia believes in the power of composable commerce to help brands quickly develop, build, deploy and optimize commerce experiences that connect people with what they want faster than ever. 

Built by Credera (formerly TA Digital) and powered by the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and technology from partners commercetools and Elastic Path, the CommerceFactory solution is a composable digital commerce platform that accelerates time-to-market and helps companies personalize their commerce strategy at scale. The combination of composable technology and a strategic, multichannel strategy has already helped a small home appliance and cookware brand completely revamp their digital commerce model, increasing revenue by 2000% and conversions by 500%!

How a cookware brand made the move from e-commerce monolith to composable commerce

When COVID-19 struck at the start of 2020, there was an explosion of interest in cooking in many countries as people spent more time at home. This led to skyrocketing demand for home appliances and an intense pressure on home goods manufacturers. One leading manufacturer found they didn’t have a proper platform to meet the high demand coming from both new and veteran home cooks. The brand’s previous web platform was clunky and prescriptive, tailored mainly to desktop users and frustrating shoppers with disjointed product pages and an unreliable multi-page checkout process. 

This frustration also translated to the employee experience for the brand’s digital teams, who often struggled to spin up new content and publish offerings across their different sites. They lacked the freedom and flexibility to personalize the brand’s online presence and deliver the same custom experiences shoppers were accustomed to having in person. So as global store closures pushed more customers to online channels, the brand turned to Credera and Acquia to help them revamp their entire commerce experience and create brand new shoppable journeys across every touchpoint.

They turned to Credera, which recommended an out-of-the-box, API-based commerce platform that granted teams the flexibility to extend their commerce services across any channel without complex, lengthy IT maintenance. 

Built on the foundation of Acquia’s Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and the open source content management capabilities of Drupal and Acquia CMS, CommerceFactory gives brands the ability to create contextual commerce experiences powered by the intelligent commerce engines of commercetools and Elastic Path. CommerceFactory is an end-to-end, fully managed commerce platform with a mobile-friendly and responsive design and machine learning-powered search and recommendation functionality. 

With the work of Credera’s implementation experts and composable architecture of an Open DXP, the home appliances brand was able to transform their entire digital commerce approach in less than 90 days and they have already seen a significant boost in their customer conversions and overall revenue. 

Serving smoother and smarter commerce experiences

After implementing a totally reimagined commerce platform in less than three months, the appliances brand saw major improvements in their overall commerce experience for both customers and employees. Their former monolithic, rigid platform required teams to manually segment and target audiences, guessing at the products they’d be most interested in without full knowledge of their previous relationship with the brand on other channels.

Today, they’re able to leverage machine learning and predictive analytics to group visitors into product and category clusters based on their behavior and quickly identify the best-fit persona for each customer, whether they’re a baking enthusiast, meal prep fan or home-cooking newbie. By knowing exactly what type of customer they’re speaking with, team members can direct them to more relevant recipes, articles and product selections. This enhancement has already improved their sites’ overall clickthrough rates by 43%!

Rather than rely on blanket discounting strategies and generic promotions that hurt margins and encourage customers to wait until the next sale to make a purchase, more accessible customer data has helped the brand identify the right discount level for each individual and reduce their overall campaign spend while increasing total margins by 30% when compared to their old platform. 

With CommerceFactory’s seamless multichannel integrations, the brand now has a unified customer view that all teams can directly access in order to tailor each interaction with customers throughout their journey. Machine learning search engines have allowed them to tailor their messages and offers for each circumstance. The result? 127% more efficiency in moving from product discovery to checkout! 

Open and extensible technology supports a faster implementation process for new functionality and services, which have helped the brand expand their capabilities around personalization, mobile-first experiences and search. The combination of enterprise experience and enterprise commerce supported by a composable architecture is a secret weapon for organizations to achieve holistic commerce experiences. As the commerce evolution has moved us from transactional to emotional experiences, CommerceFactory creates enduring connections between all sides of the buyer’s journey, no matter where they shop. 

To learn more about how Acquia and Credera help brands transform their digital business to meet customer expectations and accelerate growth in just 90 days, watch our webinar: 90 Days to E-Commerce Success.