Establishing a Unified Commerce Foundation for ALDO
Unified Commerce intertwines centralized data sources with technology and business workflows so all components of an organization’s innovation roadmap can be executed seamlessly in concert with stakeholders and the greater goals across an organization.
Founded in 1972 and headquartered in Montreal, Canada, The ALDO Group is made up of three leading brands that include ALDO, Call It Spring, and GLOBO. The ALDO Group’s vision is to be a world-leading creator and operator of desirable footwear and accessory brands by delighting customers, relentlessly pursuing profitable growth and always acting with their founder’s values of love, respect, and integrity.
The Project
ALDO and Pivotree began working together in 2015 to upgrade ALDO’s SAP Hybris platform. Pivotree, a leader in frictionless commerce solutions, came in at a critical time in ALDO’s digital transformation when they needed a long-term partner with an agile development approach and customer-first philosophy. Cultural alignment played a key role in ALDO’s decision to trust Pivotree as a partner that would help not only in delivery but in strategically furthering their internal capabilities to remove friction throughout their customer experience.
With a vision to become the world’s leading footwear and accessory brand, and with a strong customer-centric focus, it was natural that ALDO would emphasize customer experience as the foundation for their digital strategy. Using a modern, services-oriented approach, ALDO set out to lead the fashion footwear industry online with an isomorphic Javascript front-end. Pivotree was responsible for delivering the back end services required to realize the front-end vision and provided skilled front-end resources to support the ALDO team.
As an organization, ALDO has managed to successfully break down the silos between channels so that the in-store experience connects seamlessly with the online experience, resulting in a truly customer-centric omnichannel offering. Building upon this foundation, ALDO and Pivotree are driving past omnichannel towards a truly Unified Commerce experience.
Unified Commerce intertwines centralized data sources with technology and business workflows so all components of an organization’s innovation roadmap can be executed seamlessly in concert with stakeholders and the greater goals across an organization. It does this by creating a single source of truth for an organization’s data including services like transactions, customers, products and inventory and opening this data for usage across a company’s entire technology stack and workforce. This is leveraged to direct all commerce transactions into a singular flow. This will also enable a Composable Commerce approach, picking the best-in-class technology for each piece of ALDO’s customer experience.
ALDO worked with Pivotree to successfully deliver an industry-leading commerce experience that would:
Establish the technical foundation for the future vision of Unified Commerce
Provide an exceptional and unified customer experience across all channels
Increase sales
Increase customer loyalty & satisfaction
Scale eCommerce operations and expand into new geographic markets
Scale and innovate faster and more easily
Reduce friction in all customer service channels by driving towards a single source of truth for client and order management data
Project Stages
Site Refresh
This project included some new features as well as a site “refresh” that supported ALDO’s new branding guidelines with site-wide font and content consistency. Other changes included store availability improvements, mobile improvements, the evolution of the Customer Service Cockpit, CRM integration, introduction of dropshipping abilities, the addition of gift card sales and customer service pages as well as integrations with fraud detection services and A/B testing.
Headless Design
The next project included some major changes including a total site redesign and a completely new architecture. Isomorphic design using React.js was used to implement a Headless architecture that allows ALDO to make more frequent updates to site content.
Cloud Migration
This project was focused on migrating ALDO’s SAP Commerce instance from being self-managed and hosted to SAP Cloud. With this, ALDO will benefit from operational efficiencies, and managing costs. ALDO does not need to manually provision new servers in anticipation of traffic spikes, or overpay for under-utilized hardware. This also unlocks several cloud-only features.
Point of Sale (POS) and Order Management System (OMS) Replacements
Both the POS and OMS integration phases would require testing and change management in order to be able to launch widely. When embarking on the journey to Unified Commerce, ALDO realized that both their POS and OMS components would not meet their needs, and came to Pivotree early in the decision-making process to replace them. Now that they were modernizing their commerce channels, POS and OMS were recognized as hindrances and needed to follow a similar modernization process.
Quick Summary
Challenges
- Using a new agile approach with deliverables from multiple teams, continuous integration and rapid prototyping
- Finding a team to understand the new Headless Architecture
- Moving to a stateless architecture which introduced some challenges around key integrations
- Rethinking how products were merchandised online, adopting more sophisticated merchandising techniques (ie. heel height, color, material).
- Rigorously testing initial commerce environments so that they would be properly sized to support ALDO’s needs on both the front end and back office
SAP Commerce modules used included:
- SAP Commerce Cloud version 1811, as preparation for an upcoming upgrade to 1905
- Product Information Management Module (PIM)
- Customer Service Cockpit
- Omni Commerce Connect (OCC)
- Adaptive Search
Outcome
- Headless Architecture
- More flexibility for deploying new features
- Greater control over the customer experience
- Ability to scale digital offering more easily
- More flexibility for deploying new features
- ALDO customers benefit from an industry-leading customer experience that extends beyond digital towards the Unified Commerce vision
- A stronger-than-ever partnership foundation between Pivotree and ALDO
Overcoming The Challenges
Site Refresh
This project included some new features as well as a site “refresh” that supported ALDO’s new branding guidelines with site-wide font and content consistency. Other changes included store availability improvements, mobile improvements, the evolution of the Customer Service Cockpit, CRM integration, introduction of dropshipping abilities, the addition of gift card sales and customer service pages as well as integrations with fraud detection services and A/B testing.
Headless Design
The next project included some major changes including a total site redesign and a completely new architecture. Isomorphic design using React.js was used to implement a Headless architecture that allows ALDO to make more frequent updates to site content.
Cloud Migration
This project was focused on migrating ALDO’s SAP Commerce instance from being self-managed and hosted to SAP Cloud. With this, ALDO will benefit from operational efficiencies, and managing costs. ALDO does not need to manually provision new servers in anticipation of traffic spikes, or overpay for under-utilized hardware. This also unlocks several cloud-only features.
Point of Sale (POS) and Order Management System (OMS) Replacements
Both the POS and OMS integration phases would require testing and change management in order to be able to launch widely. When embarking on the journey to Unified Commerce, ALDO realized that both their POS and OMS components would not meet their needs, and came to Pivotree early in the decision-making process to replace them. Now that they were modernizing their commerce channels, POS and OMS were recognized as hindrances and needed to follow a similar modernization process.
The Technical Solution
The new ALDO site uses SAP Commerce Cloud as a service layer, managing catalogue, pricing, and transactions.
SAP Commerce modules used included:
- SAP Commerce Cloud version 1811, as preparation for an upcoming upgrade to 1905
- Product Information Management Module (PIM)
- Customer Service Cockpit
- Omni Commerce Connect (OCC)
- Adaptive Search
Integrations included:
- Order Management Software
- Payment Systems
- Social Commerce Platform
- User-Generated Content Service/Reviews & Referrals
- Translation Service
- Digital Marketing Automation
- Product Recommendation Service
- Content Management System
Why Composable Commerce?
Composable Commerce – using the best-in-class technology available for each component of your Commerce tech stack, rather than relying on one platform or one provider for your end-to-end customer experience.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, organizations that adopt a composable approach will be able to implement new features 80% faster than their competition.
The Impact
The result is a modern, Headless architecture that gives ALDO more flexibility when deploying new features and greater control over the customer experience. By separating the user experience from the eCommerce platform (decoupling the front-end from back-end), the company can scale their digital offering more easily. The ALDO team can now comfortably make front-end changes on a more frequent basis without redeploying the entire commerce platform.
The Headless SAP Commerce platform lays the foundation for ALDO’s future vision of a completely connected omnichannel experience, extending the eCommerce experience to their brick-and-mortar stores.
ALDO customers benefit from an industry-leading customer experience that extends beyond digital towards the Unified Commerce vision.
The foundation of Pivotree and ALDO’s partnership remains stronger than ever; both partners viewing Frictionless Commerce not as a singular project but as a journey that we will continue, together.