Earlier this month, DEPT® journeyed to Salesforce Connections to celebrate and peek into the future of innovative and immersive commerce experiences.
As a Salesforce partner since 2016 and recently the first certified Salesforce Full Stack Commerce partner, DEPT® took to the stage to share a glimpse into the agency’s breadth of commerce services and solutions we provide clients across their Salesforce ecosystems.
In the session “Crawl, Walk, Run with Composable Commerce,” DEPT®’s VP Commerce, US, Ryan Nicholson, and Chief Salesforce Architect, Steve Holsinger, joined our client, vineyard vines, to discuss our hybrid approach to composable commerce and what it looks like in action for the iconic clothing brand.
Calculated moves and risk management
The future of e-commerce experiences revolves around a headless and composable approach. But for many brands and retailers that still run on legacy Salesforce solutions, such as Site Genesis or Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA), decoupling the front-end and back-end sounds like an overwhelming and potentially risky digital undertaking. That’s why the DEPT® method for moving from legacy platforms to a headless digital storefront nixes the notion that it should be all or nothing. Instead, we focus on reducing risk and extracting maximum value by taking one intentional step at a time — what we call the crawl, walk, run approach.
Crawling, walking, and running with vineyard vines
For more than a decade, vineyard vines has relied on Salesforce to provide an exceptional online retail experience for its B2B and B2C customers and further its mission to encourage people to live the Good Life. The clothing brand built its site (and still runs) on Site Genesis, and has leveraged a variety of Salesforce products and solutions over the course of their relationship.
In 2022, vineyard vines tapped DEPT® and a team of elite partners to expand and optimize its commerce offering with customization capabilities using Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Now, vineyard vines continues to work with DEPT® as it relaunches its commerce capabilities through a hybrid composable approach.
The goal? Eliminate years of accumulated technical debt, improve site performance, and establish future-state platform flexibility and scalability.
Crawling
To ensure a successful launch, we prioritize putting extensive effort into the initial stages of research and discovery — key components of the “crawl” phase. Kicking off the project with vineyard vines, we began by understanding limitations of its current solution and identifying areas of opportunity and impact. By documenting all of vineyard vines’ existing settings, features, and functionalities, we were able to determine which areas were most critical to update while also uncovering a variety of unused, unnecessary, or invaluable features.
This research exercise was critical in reducing risk and surprises down the line and allowed us to focus on the key areas that drive revenue or uphold the vineyard vines brand. With our desired future-state roadmap defined and a deep understanding of customers’ key interaction points and opportunities for improvement, we began the process of migrating the highest impact areas.
At each step, our Salesforce experts worked closely with the vineyard vines internal team to align on all decisions and provide them the tools, knowledge, and skills to maintain and successfully run their new solution.
Walking
After completing the initial migration of features for vineyard vines composable commerce solution, the site currently sees about 5% of its traffic funneling through the composable storefront. Early impacts we’ve seen include:
- ~19% performance improvement on page types implemented in PWA Kit
- ~1.1s improvement on First Contentful Paint (FCP)
- Content management with clicks, not code
- Significantly improved customer experience on mobile devices
- Conversion rate and AOV improvement
As part of the “walking” phase, DEPT® and vineyard vines will continue A/B testing the solution to measure impact, identify areas to further refine the technical and user experience, and uncover and resolve potential performance issues. As we migrate, optimize, or eliminate remaining legacy pages and features, vineyard vines will achieve increased freedom from its legacy framework.
Running
For vineyard vines, “running” remains the next step as the brand methodically expands the rollout of its composable commerce solution, refining and optimizing at every turn. Often times, the running phase involves projects including:
- Incorporating personalized rich content into the commerce experience
- Launching a PWA to replace or pilot a mobile app from a single codebase
- Integrating best-in-class composable tools like Einstein AI or Contentful
All or nothing is rarely an effective strategy for building successful, sustainable, and scalable digital solutions. Our team of technology and commerce experts is uniquely positioned to help pioneering brands around the world, like vineyard vines, innovate and transform their Salesforce ecosystems as they make the critical, future-proofing move to headless and composable commerce.
To experience the presentation for yourself and learn more about our ongoing partnership with Salesforce and clients like with vineyard vines, sign up for our upcoming Crawl, Walk, Run with Composable Commerce webinar.
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Chief Architect at DEPT®