What is composable commerce 2024: Pros, cons, examples
Composable commerce is modular, low-code approach to building unique digital storefronts across channels and touchpoints.
For Carhartt, the holiday season is the “Super Bowl” event of the year. In 2022, this leading retailer based out of Michigan followed a new customer experience (CX) playbook when it comes to their e-commerce platform in order to win the big game.
Much more than simply a maker of workwear, Carhartt has a longstanding family history, dating back to 1889, of delivering durable apparel and other products that serve and protect hardworking people. So, it’s no wonder they put pride into delivering a comprehensive and seamless customer experience from discovery to delivery and beyond.
When it came time to plan for the 2022 holidays, Carhartt leaned into their digital commerce playbook.
Carhartt’s e-commerce platform focused on two key areas:
- Optimizing technology for stability, integration, and security
- Enhancing agility to prioritize product messaging
Carhartt’s e-commerce platform: Optimizing technology for a smooth road ahead
Throughout 2022, Carhartt worked to ensure the technology they used did not fail them when they needed it most. Prior to the holiday season, they honed in on areas that could help the e-commerce team work more efficiently and help their website avoid downtimes.
Two main achievements helped them stay agile and run smoothly:
- The UX team used an enterprise-grade e-commerce platform from SAP to create repeatable components. This allowed the operations team to focus on building experiences versus getting bogged down by building new components every time they needed to perform a product page update. Using templatized components, the operations team quickly built unique experiences in a matter of hours. Shifting an asset in previous years would require a rebuild of the component, lots of back-and-forth with the creative team, and then uploading the assets again. On the new platform, however, their front-end developers simply plugged and played the component code to quickly move the asset.
- The Carhartt team used Dynatrace to monitor performance trends on their website. This allowed the retailer to identify issues proactively, reach out to their support team at SAP, and make improvements. For example, the team could recognize when and where on the page components needed to be changed. And because they operated on a cloud platform, Carhartt could quickly scale up additional resources to ensure that there was no downtime on the site.
Learn more about Carhartt’s e-commerce journey + evolution: visit their customer story page.
Delivering quality product messaging and enhanced CX
For the 2022 holidays, Carhartt wanted to ensure that their product messaging hit home. Thanks to the templatized components, they could easily change the messaging on their website and product pages. This helped the team enhance the overall CX.
With messaging in place, Carhartt focused on delivering the right assets to draw in traffic. On Cyber Monday, for example, the team made a tough decision to change an asset midday.
For those in retail, this may sound like a completely wild move, but the trends showed they needed to make an update.
The IT team felt very confident that they could avoid a 30-45 minute downtime needed to rebuild and cache components. And that decision proved to be correct. The update to the asset helped them exceed forecast.
Digital powerhouse: Real-time adaptability that drives revenue results
Keeping CX top-of-mind does not come at the expense of margins. To avoid losing customers by going overboard with promotions, Carhartt used the agility built into SAP Commerce Cloud to make adjustments to their online promotions within a few minutes when necessary.
To ensure a seamless CX, Carhartt leaned on partners like True Fit to help shoppers find the right sizes for their bodies. Carhartt also added a component to help shoppers know when they reached eligibility for free shipping based on their basket value.
And finally, since their migration to the C4 platform and now integrated more tightly with SAP, cancellation rates decreased by 22%.
“For those of us in the retail space, we never really look at Thanksgiving weekend as a long weekend from a relaxation standpoint… Besides a few prescheduled check-in calls, our teams were able to enjoy the weekend and that had a lot to do with the stability of the platform and our ability to see things coming and react to them before they happen”, said Donavan Marchywka, Director of Digital Solutions at Carhartt
Carhartt’s careful planning leading up to the holiday season was critical for its success. For 2023, Carhartt aims to build on their holiday momentum and deliver more best-in-class experiences that consumers have come to love about the brand.
They’re looking to create strong integrations across the organization and their technology vendors – including providing more transparency to shoppers on product availability, restocking timelines, and more.
