Discover the transformative power of composable commerce through the inspiring retail success stories of John Lewis & Partners, The Very Group and River Island. By partnering with commercetools, they're able to offer personalized, seamless shopping experiences across all channels, resulting in significant increases in online sales and customer loyalty.
With the rise of digital-first shopping experiences across all digital channels and the increasing importance of customer engagement, retailers must be agile and responsive to new challenges and opportunities in order to succeed. But with so many complex systems and technologies to manage, it can be difficult for retailers to keep up with the latest trends and deliver the seamless, personalized experiences that customers demand.
That's where composable commerce comes in — a cutting-edge approach to eCommerce that offers unparalleled flexibility, scalability and agility. By enabling retailers to build their own unique eCommerce ecosystems from a modular set of flexible APIs, composable commerce enables retailers to create unique customer experiences, no matter where shoppers want to engage
At the forefront of this composable commerce movement is commercetools — our composable commerce solutions empower retailers to scale without limits and accelerate go-to-market times, as well as create innovative shopping experiences that drive growth and customer loyalty. By leveraging the power of APIs and microservices architecture, commercetools offers retailers unparalleled flexibility to create unique eCommerce ecosystems that can quickly and easily adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands.
And that's exactly why retailers like John Lewis & Partners, The Very Group and River Island have seen incredible success after partnering with us.
John Lewis & Partners: Digital CX transformation
John Lewis & Partners, a renowned high-end department store brand in Great Britain, Ireland and Australia, decided to re-platform johnlewis.com to provide tailored customer experiences via composable commerce due to increasing customer demands and technical debt accumulated by their legacy platform, Oracle ATG. As part of their phased migration plan, the company partnered with commercetools to conduct omnichannel commerce, and design customized journeys for various touchpoints, such as in-store, webshop and mobile app.
The retailer chose commercetools because it offered the scalability and reliability they needed to move towards their ambitious goal of migrating off their legacy commerce platform to a flexible API-first, microservices-led cloud service. The commercetools solution allowed John Lewis & Partners to customize digital customer experience journeys while also supporting their commitment to providing a leading online shopping experience.
John Lewis & Partners is supercharging its investment online to adapt to changes in consumer behavior. Our partnership with commercetools forms part of this.
Chief Information Officer, John Lewis & Partners
The first customer order placed without using Oracle ATG in nine years was successfully completed in February 2022 through the new Digital Foundations Purchasing solution provided by commercetools, marking a major milestone in their journey of migrating off of a legacy platform. According to the Tech Lead at JL, the process of ingesting 325,000 products that took days with Oracle ATG, only took commercetools 15 minutes.
Furthermore, John Lewis & Partners found commercetools to be a strong vendor supported by a well-defined commerce technology roadmap in line with their own vision to launch and scale digital propositions faster while delivering more omnichannel experiences for their customers. The success of John Lewis & Partners' transition to commercetools Composable Commerce demonstrates the rewards of bold actions toward digital transformation.
The Very Group: Modernizing with MACH®
A leading multi-brand online retailer in the UK that sells clothing, footwear, and home appliances, The Very Group partnered with commercetools to modernize its eCommerce solution using commercetools' MACH software, enabling a composable commerce approach.
By migrating to commercetools' flexible and scalable solution, The Very Group was able to improve its overall customer experience by providing faster page load times and reducing the time to market for new features. Additionally, commercetools' cloud-native architecture enabled The Very Group to achieve better operational efficiency and cost savings through the use of AWS services.
The Very Group was able to complete its phased migration without any downtime or disruption to its 4.8 million customers, demonstrating the smoothness of the transition to commercetools. With commercetools' modern eCommerce solution and the power of AWS services, The Very Group is well-positioned to continue innovating and delivering exceptional customer experiences.
[commercetools] is a MACH-compliant SaaS provider that is very specialized in eCommerce. We partnered with them because they're very good at what they do, so that gives us the best composable commerce component we can get currently on the market — and AWS.
Senior Solutions Architect, The Very Group
River Island: Game-changing self-checkout
River Island, the British fashion street retailer, has launched a pilot for an RFID (radio-frequency identification) self-checkout service at one of its busiest stores — with the help of commercetools in the backend. With this service, customers can drop products into an RFID bucket and complete the transaction, eliminating the need for customers to wait in line to be served by a store associate at the traditional cash register. The target for self-checkout was set at 50%, but results have been even better, with figures closer to 70%.
Although still early days, the results from the project have been astounding and could quickly become a game-changing development for River Island when the decision is made to roll-out to the wider estate. Whilst we set a target of 50% of all in-store transactions being processed through self-checkout, we are already seeing this figure closer to 70%.
Director of Technology Operations, River Island
By switching to a composable commerce solution, River Island can reduce maintenance costs and break away from lengthy and expensive on-premise release cycles towards quicker and more agile upgrades via the cloud. With the successful pilot, River Island's vision of speeding up checkout and increasing conversion rates could become a turning point for development when the decision is made to roll out the self-checkout service to more stores.
To learn more about how you can accelerate your digital and business transformation with modern commerce, download our white paper Reimagining Retail Commerce in 2023.