Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™ Spotlight: Lessons from leaders who moved beyond monolithic eCommerce

Hundreds of businesses that rely on eCommerce to generate revenue are still running on monolithic platforms. Although the evolution of commerce over the past 10 years has made digital transformation an imperative for any business seeking growth, many just haven’t migrated to a more modern, i.e. composable, solution. One of the best catalysts to spur your digital transformation is to seek guidance from other companies that have been through it and are now reaping the benefits. Thankfully, at Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™, multiple customers agreed to share their migration experiences, allowing attendees to take home best practices to (hopefully) make the journey easier.

Here, we’ve summarized a few of the best migration stories and insights from the event.

John Lewis opened his first store on London’s Oxford Street in 1864. Today, the employee-owned company operates 34 stores across the UK, which generate $12.5 billion in annual revenue. It also owns Waitrose, a chain of 329 grocery stores, three cooking schools and a farm, which provides many of the food products it sells. 

Back in 2001, the company purchased an eCommerce business, buy.com. At the time, many internal stakeholders could not understand the decision to spend money on an internet fad. Of course, by 2013 they had outgrown buy.com and in 2013, the company migrated to Oracle ATG. As Simon Skelton, Platform & Operations Manager shared with the audience, “Whilst it served us well for many years, it became apparent that it was holding back our growth ambitions and that its monolithic architecture wasn't serving us well.”

In 2018, they launched their second replatform. This time, they brought in Deloitte as their SI partner, who led them to choose commercetools’ headless, microservices-based approach. This involved slowly strangling the platform by splitting out the presentation layer. Eventually, just the purchasing capability was left, which Simon Fulford, Delivery & Operations Manager, described as their “heart transplant” and an “extremely complex piece of work.” He explained that getting to this point required planning and implementing change across three key areas: Commerce architecture, engineering capability, and continuous delivery and operability. 

Here, he explains the thought process behind the migration plan.

Today, johnlewis.com, running on modern composable technology built on top of the commercetools engine, accounts for 50% of the company’s total revenue.

A molecular diagnostic company, Cepheid, provides PCR lab equipment and testing that enables medical providers to identify and treat diseases early. As the products are complex, typically requiring demonstration, and the path to purchase can often be tricky, digital commerce was not part of the company’s strategy. However, when COVID-19 hit, customers became desperate to know the status of their orders, spurring the need for rapid digital transformation. 

In early 2021, the company turned to EPAM and commercetools to support the journey. Here, Amelita Ebuña, Director of eCommerce, shares the steps the organization took to move from discovery to go live in six months.

Today, the MyCepheid portal provides its B2B customers with a personalized dashboard where they can quickly access and manage orders, invoices and shipment information as well as view open cases. Everything a customer needs to know about their account is easily accessible There’s even a ‘Buy Again’ widget to expedite the reordering of previously ordered items. On the support side, customers can manage their equipment, check service history, review warranty information/expiration dates and connect with customer service experts.

The Cepheid online store features its complete inventory of field test and collection devices. Designed for speed, customers can quickly and easily check product availability, view their contract prices and get estimated delivery dates. Amelita offered two examples of features they’ve added to improve the customer experience: 

1. Quick Add: A feature that creates a shortcut to the cart when showing the results of a product or SKU search.

2. Standing Orders: A feature that enables buyers with large orders to set up different delivery dates for their orders.

ISC2 is the largest cybersecurity training and certification company in the world. Based in Alexandria, VA, the membership-based organization has over 600,000 members, associates and candidates around the globe and provides several products including coursework, exams, etc. Richard Shandelman, Vice President of Technology, explained after continual struggles with their monolithic platform, his team sat down to create a multi-year roadmap.

Richard said ISC2 had already acknowledged that transitioning to composable architecture was the only way to gain the flexibility they needed to expand into other countries. “It's really important in our mission to have one user experience that enables localization for when we’re ready to spin up a Japanese site or a site in India.”

They tapped Valtech to guide them in their digital transformation. The first phase was a refreshed brand identity and a new user-friendly website that offers enhanced search capabilities, in addition to a more personalized experience, which they launched in August 2023. Next, using a list provided by Valtech, they began the search for a composable vendor that could meet all of their requirements.

ISC2 is now deep into the implementation phase building out its MVP. They plan to launch the US site with American currency first. Once they confirm the functionality, they’ll start adding other currencies and the geolocation of those markets. “That is just the beginning,” said Richard. “I don't expect us to get everything out all at once. We can't boil the ocean—  but we can try though.”

Throughout the journey, Richard has placed a strong focus on data. He stressed that choosing to be data-first — creating a data dictionary, governance and strategy — is truly helping drive the roadmap.

A unique business idea that evolved from the founder’s wife being unable to find a custom fabric she was looking for, Now owned by Shutterfly, Spoonflower, is a thriving marketplace that sells custom fabric, wallpapers and home decor created by small, independent artists and designers. As every product they offer is printed on demand, the company has some unique challenges.p

Bryan Ziegler, Senior Director, shared that while their original monolith platform did a fantastic job scaling the business, it got to a point where developers were afraid to make changes because the system got so complex. He said the team started looking for a hybrid build strategy because they knew an off-the-shelf vendor couldn’t handle the billions of SKUs they have. That’s when he started looking for a vendor to take on this transformation.” I was like, 'I need some outside help.’ I had enough challenges getting everybody up to speed on the legacy platform, let alone build something new. Let's bring somebody in to help us understand where to go and what these tools are capable of and they can help point us in the right direction, then dig in ourselves and learn as well.”

Spoonflower found Orium through a recommendation from Rick Watson, founder of RMW Commerce, created a timeline and was finally able to kick off the project in January 2023. The company plans to launch the commerce experience with checkout functionality in the Fall of 2024. Bryan acknowledged that the transition is taking a little longer than expected, but points to a variety of factors to explain it, including the company being acquired by Shutterfly three years ago.  “Right now, everything's sort of organic. As we start to launch more content, more featured artists, more featured collaborators and doing more integrations with commercetools as our search engine, we’ll be able to get more scalable patterns in the CMS and make stuff more dynamic and more maintainable.”

Bryan said the ultimate goal is to get to a point where they can innovate in the customer experience to continually make it easier to connect artists with consumers, so they can find the right design to make something beautiful. At the end of the day, he concluded, digital transformation is about planning.

To gain more insights from the customers, industry experts and commercetools leaders who spoke at Elevate, sign up for access to the Keynote replays on the Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™ landing page.