White Stuff Quickly Lifts Customer Experience with BigCommerce

SOLUTION

Headless gives flexibility and speed.

Offering customers a better experience through performance improvements was the initial motivation factor that prompted White Stuff to replatform to BigCommerce. It knew speed and functionality were constrained by the technology it was using, so the solution was to separate the front- and back-ends by going headless.

“I was really adamant about the role of speed on the site because of the need with fashion retail to bring content to life through the increased use of video and rich imagery that a customer wants to experience our brand,” says Steve.

“So that really drove some decisions around a headless implementation. We felt that that was the best way to retain a lightweight front-end and give us the maximum chance of consistently being able to provide that fast experience for customers.”

This speed and increased flexibility was achieved through the decision to go headless which liberated White Stuff to work with the vendors who specialise in building the best tools for a particular function. 

The multiple benefits of a MACH and partner-first approach.

This MACH approach (Micro-services, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) meant the brand could integrate the solutions it felt were the best fit for its strategy, rather than accept a monolithic solution for all aspects of its ecommerce operation. 

After opting for BigCommerce as its central ecommerce platform, it worked with Apply Digital for implementation, Alokai [previously Vue Storefront] for its front-end, Amplience for content management, Akeneo for product information management and Constructor for search and product discovery. It also localised its website for a variety of markets with BigCommerce Multi-Storefront. 

This composable strategy, of integrating the best tools, allowed White Stuff to supplement its in-house professionals with a wider range of experienced partners who could work together to give the business the fast, slick site it required.  

“We have a relatively small team, and therefore we look for good partners,” Steve explains. “We’ve gone with a partner-first approach. Running a proof of concept with Amplience, Vue Storefront, and Constructor gave us the confidence that these solutions would work really well together, would give us the headless solution we were looking for to keep things lightweight, and would give us the ability to innovate quickly.”

Simple checkout, flexible collections.

White Stuff was very clear its focus was on customer experience. Rather than redesigning the site, the aim was to bring shoppers closer to the brand by removing any friction preventing them from finding the perfect items and ordering them.

The biggest boost to customer experience here was a shift from a three-page to one-page checkout. While White Stuff customers had not complained about its older, more cumbersome checkout process, the brand determined speeding up and simplifying the process would be a good move — and A/B testing proved the hunch was correct. 

Friction was not only removed at the payment stage, but also delivery. Rather than make customers choose between shopping in-store or online, White Stuff opted for an omnichannel approach using click and collect. 

“We're a pretty lightweight team and so we need to be agile to adapt to customer expectations, which are changing very quickly,” Steve Borg says. 

“What started off as a premium experience can become very normal very quickly. Click and collect was a small percentage of our business a few years ago but 20% of online orders are click and collect these days. So the expectation is that if you're a multichannel retailer, you need to execute click and collect very well.”

Content agility, the star of the online experience.

White Stuff’s previous platform not only gave its users a slow experience, it did the same for the company’s small ecommerce team. Content was difficult to find and repurpose on the retail site and creating digital marketing campaigns at speed was virtually impossible. 

Hence, the company knew that while customers needed a better experience, so too did its retail and marketing teams. This came through a new Content Management System (CMS), which allows for assets to be discovered and repurposed at breakneck speed.

“One of the major transformational parts of this project has been around content management,” says Steve Borg. 

“We were spending days or even weeks developing a new campaign or executing changes. With BigCommerce, we can now do this in hours or even minutes because we've got a content management solution and an ecommerce platform that seamlessly plug in together.”