3 Websites That Treat Online Customers Right

Retail has seen some big shifts during the last several years. Digital commerce continues to grow at a rapid pace with more retailers closing brick-and-mortar stores. Even today on Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, more consumers are shopping online than in stores.

The challenge for brands is that today’s shoppers have infinite options at their fingertips with vast amounts of information and content guiding them to compare different products and prices. Consequently, brands face even steeper competition from their direct competitors, as well as big retailers.

To attract new buyers and retain existing customers, brands have adapted their digital strategy to create a cohesive customer experience that tells their story, and brings together content and commerce for a more relevant, in-context interaction, while still offering great performance on the back end.

We’ve rounded up three examples of beautiful commerce experiences.

Wilson Wins At Experiential Commerce

You can’t think of sporting goods without thinking of Wilson.

For more than a 100 years, Wilson has provided gear for both professional athletes and consumers. Through digital, Wilson has been able to create an engaging shopping experience for its consumers, one that’s both responsive and content rich. Wilson’s site marries content and commerce, with each of its brands, products, and sports having its own distinct design aesthetic.

Working with partner HS2 and Acquia, Wilson created a seamless integration between Drupal’s CMS, Magento’s eCommerce system, and their preferred PIM and CRM tools. As a result, Wilson is able to deliver experiential commerce on any device or channel, rapidly and at scale.

Wilson’s strategy enables their teams to better incorporate storytelling about their favorite sports into product pages. While consumers come to Wilson.com to purchase equipment, they also come to the site for content on their favorite teams. Wilson has improved revenue by 10 percent on site and by 44 percent on mobile.

Weber Grills Fosters A Grilling Culture

Picture this: A warm sunny day on a holiday weekend, with family and friends on a deck enjoying barbecue straight off the grill.

When it comes to offering great customer experiences, Weber’s is one of the best. Weber positions itself as being more than just a grill and accessories; for Weber it’s about the grilling culture and exposure to Weber as a lifestyle.

Weber Grills differentiates its brand from big retailers by sharing its story and combining brand presentation with commerce on digital. Weber’s site offers its visitors a captivating, fully dynamic and beautifully designed website that’s both informative and useful.

Weber’s site features a grilling section that showcases their culture and the grilling lifestyle, offering recipes and grill skills for its visitors. Working with partners Media Monks and Acquia, Weber features a decoupled architecture that employs multiple e-commerce systems and personalization with Acquia Lift, integrated into the custom front end framework.

Combining Drupal with a front-end framework provided the autonomy for the Weber team to create any type of animation and design needed, while allowing for customizations for local audiences. Drupal was also responsible for the content management and the back-end (API).

Using the power and flexibility of Drupal’s open modular framework, they could access different modules, reducing the effort needed to deliver the right solution for their site. Since the launch of the new weber.com site, average session duration is 2:37, with 3.17 pages per session. For every dollar spent, Weber has seen a 200 percent return on investment.

Interflora Withstands Peak Shopping Traffic

When it comes to online shopping, retailers will all agree that it’s critical to have your site up and running at all times – especially during peak shopping days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

This isn’t an issue for Interflora, one of the world’s largest suppliers of flowers. When planning for the site redesign, the goal was to maintain market position as a leading supplier of flowers with a brand new platform, designed as a personalized gift universe.

The new site had to be built to handle even the most extreme peaks in traffic volume, which equates to potentially thousands of transactions per hour.

From a design perspective, our partner Adapt A/S worked with the Interflora team to put the focus of the site on the customer with a better user experience and optimized checkout-flow that creates a smooth journey from browsing to purchasing.

Interflora’s new site delivers the best experience to its visitors, regardless of device, time or occasion, drawing them into a personalized gift universe that is built to withstand even the super spikes. Interflora’s new experience provides a better load speed, reducing the average load time by 56 percent and a smoother checkout experience, increasing basket sizes by an average of 15 percent.