Trail Appliances

The challenge: The need for a more flexible commerce foundation

As Trail Appliances continued to grow, its existing Magento 2 Cloud (now known as Adobe Commerce) platform was becoming a constraint rather than an enabler.

The platform was complex and time-consuming for developers to maintain, making it difficult to deploy new features and fixes quickly. Despite rising licensing costs, Trail Appliances wasn't seeing new capabilities from the platform that would enable the retailer to differentiate its customer experience. Most importantly, Adobe lacked the capabilities to execute sophisticated promotional scenarios and custom business logic, which are at the heart of Trail Appliances' success.

Having outgrown the legacy platform, the retailer started the process of modernizing its commerce foundation to:

• Support the company's continued growth and set the stage to boost sales.
• Support complex promotions and delivery requirements without requiring extensive workarounds or long time-to-market.
• Improve developer efficiency by making the platform easier to maintain, upgrade and evolve.
• Remove technology constraints that prevented the business from pursuing new opportunities.
• Create a foundation for an AI-enabled future.
• Remain within a budget range comfortable for the business.

Ultimately, the goal was to create a flexible, future-ready commerce foundation that could support growth, innovation and the company's long-term ambitions, all while remaining within budget and minimizing disruption to the business.

The solution: A flexible, easily integrated commerce ecosystem designed to evolve

Trail Appliances set out to build the best technology stack, prioritizing flexibility to support complex industry requirements. Key criteria included:

• Ease of development and extensibility.
• Integration capabilities.
• Platform and company maturity.
• Future readiness, particularly around AI.
• Overall fit within budget.

‍commercetools B2C Commerce met these criteria, providing a hyper-flexible foundation that enables the company to tailor the customer experience without the constraints of a predefined platform. The ability to integrate easily with best-of-breed solutions such as Algolia and Voucherify, as well as emerging technologies like AI, was also key to building the solution the team envisioned.

A highlight of the new setup is how Trail Appliances connected the commercetools Sphere platform with Voucherify to manage promotions, coupons, gift-with-purchase offers and discount stacking rules. The two platforms are connected by the Voucherify Integration Service, a Node.js/TypeScript application deployed as a commercetools Connect app.

The integration works synchronously with the cart, so every cart change is evaluated in real time, eliminating the need for separate sync jobs. For the customer, the storefront can show the savings next to each product, like the discount on an extended warranty or installation, so they can see what the complete purchase will cost before checking out. For the company, this is equally beneficial, as it makes services and warranties more visible, increasing the chance they're added to the order.

The modular approach gave Trail Appliances the flexibility to use the right technology for each part of the experience while keeping commerce at the center of the architecture. It also enabled its lean team of five developers to extend functionality and solve complex use cases through APIs rather than relying solely on out-of-the-box capabilities.

Orium played an important role at the outset, helping establish the ecosystem architecture, develop the payment solution, shape the product data model and explore the company's AI approach for the future. The commercetools team was also closely involved throughout the build, providing guidance on implementation approaches, responding quickly when support was needed and sharing visibility into upcoming improvements that could benefit Trail Appliances.

For the migration from Adobe to commercetools, Trail Appliances deliberately gave itself one year and chose a "big bang" approach. The additional time allowed the team to properly build and test the new ecosystem, rather than rushing the transition or compromising the experience.

The most significant technical challenge was the payment gateway. Because Trail Appliances was using a legacy payment partner that wasn't supported out of the box by commercetools, the team needed to develop custom integration code. With Orium's support, they were able to address the challenge and launch on schedule.

The overall implementation was remarkably smooth, with the team describing it as the "easiest rollout" they had been part of:

• The migration was completed on time after one year of implementation.
• The company experienced the expected slight dip in SEO immediately after launch, but recovered shortly after.
• The team made final tweaks and adjustments with ease as it approached launch.

The migration not only delivered a new commerce platform but also strengthened the internal team's capabilities in modern commerce, APIs and integrating multiple services to solve complex business requirements.

The rollout was one of the easiest we've ever been part of. We gave ourselves the time to do it right, and that allowed us to launch smoothly and on schedule. Now, with commercetools at the center of our composable architecture, we have a foundation that can evolve with technology and customer behavior - without requiring another massive rebuild.

Josh Johnston

Vice President of Marketing and Digital Strategy, Trail Appliances

The result: Faster performance, stronger conversion and a foundation for continued growth

Since launching on commercetools, Trail Appliances has seen significant improvements across site performance, conversion, revenue and SEO:

• Over 100% increase in the website conversion rate.
• 48% increase in order volume.
• Load time cut by 57%, from 6 seconds to 2.6 seconds.
• 29% increased warranty attachment rate, the percentage of main product sales where a customer also buys an extended warranty.
• Strong double-digit revenue growth since launch.
• Average SEO ranking improved by approximately 200%, moving from around position 30 to 9-10.

These results are tracked alongside other key metrics, including the cost to maintain the new platform relative to projected costs for the previous platform. Feedback from across the business has been overwhelmingly positive.

The move to commercetools has also changed how the team operates and helped reduce costs, with Trail Appliances estimating about 130 development hours saved per month. This represents about US$9,000 in monthly development efficiency value, or approximately US$100,000 annually. These improvements are driven by:

• Backend development: Approximately 30 hours saved monthly by eliminating Magento's platform maintenance, security patching and complex deployments.
• Frontend development: Developers report being 2-3 times more productive with the new architecture, and a conservative estimate puts the company at 100 hours of development capacity saved monthly.
• Operational improvements: Faster deployments, fewer platform dependencies, reduced production risk and less time dedicated to troubleshooting.

In addition to deploying new features faster, developers leverage the platform's flexibility to address new business requirements through extensions and integrations, particularly with emerging technologies such as AI.

For example, the company is leveraging Commerce MCP by commercetools to use AI for multiple use cases. The team has launched an internal AI tool for employees that provides recommendations and alerts to improve online performance and assist with support ticket lookups. A customer-facing AI tool is also in the works to answer product questions and help customers find the right appliances and services.

The Voucherify AI integration has also enabled Trail Appliances to automate 70% of its campaigns. Previously, setting up a campaign took a merchandiser around two days; now, the same process takes just five hours. This has saved 270 hours, freeing merchandisers to focus on campaign strategy rather than manual setup.

Looking ahead, Trail Appliances will also continue investing in SEO, AEO and AI discovery to increase site visibility and traffic, expand product configurability to make it easier to create bespoke appliance solutions, and explore deeper personalization and new ways for customers to research and purchase through AI interfaces.