• From no ecommerce presence at all, to a pilot, to a headless MVP, to an advanced implementation in 3 years

• AI ready business model that delivered the following KPIs:
  • Doubled sales YoY for 3 consecutive years
  • Exceeded 50% adoption target
  • Delivered net sales lift target

Foundational → Programmatic → Smart

A note on internal alignment

Every team needs to be on board: Marketing, Sales, Digital, IT, Supply Chain, Customer Service.

Major Topics to consider:

• Channel conflict
• Unification of customer journey in one place
• Website as a support tool - i.e. ensure all content is present in search & other experiences. No silos.
• Website as BI - what can other teams gain from the data your ecommerce team is producing?

A brief history of Commerce at Dawn

• 2018 – No eCommerce experience
• April 2019 (SS2) – V1 Ecommerce: “Not easy to do business with us yet… but it’s a start”
• October 2019 (SS3) – Composable Commerce Architecture decision: “We need to move faster with best in class”
• July 2020 (SS4/5) – CommerceTools Implementation: Building a foundation
• 2021+ (SS6) – 1 Piece at a time…: Based on customer feedback, starting with search

Why did we decide to go Headless?

Speed, flexibility, control

• Complete control over mapping our stack to functional requirements
• Flexibility in replacing vendors who aren’t keeping up with commerce
• Best in class tech suited to our business
• In house capacity to manage and update, vs relying on vendor services

Stack today

• Fit-for-purpose technologies and platforms
• Modern API-driven architecture
• Zero-downtime and Cloud-focused
• Future-proofing for continuous innovation for the next 3-5 years
• Maintain control of Dawn’s roadmap and destiny

The Journey

It all started with feedback

Internal

• “We’re not making it easy for customers to do business with us.”
• “We don’t have the configurability we need to address that”
• “We’re not getting insights from the search experience”

External

• “Hard to find what I’m looking for… not all content on the site is discoverable”
• “I need one place to go to find everything I need”
• “Search feature still needs work. I searched for corn starch and none came up, just a bunch of other items.”
• “The search engine on the website needs to be more accurate. it is almost impossible to find what you are looking for when you ask for a specific item, and you get 200 items that have absolutely nothing to do with what you are looking for. Extremely frustrating.”
• Your search box is worthless! Try it yourself - enter any random item and

What was the customer seeing?

• Before - Irrelevant results, over 1K results
• After - Refined results

How we decided to make a change

Key Metrics / Feedback: Our “why?”

Address:

• Search Abandonment
• Search conversions
• Feedback / NPS

“Our customers should have one place to go to discover what they need”

Capacity / Prioritization: Our “How”

Address:

• Technology limitations
• Internal Team Capacity
• Delivery team

“We’ll change out one lego block at a time, starting with the biggest impact”

Setting the goalpost: How will we know?

Address:

• User/internal feedback
• Tracking & analytics
• Testing & QA

“We should see an uplift in conversion, increase in session time, and a reduction in abandonment”

Setting a foundation with v1

All content needs to be accessible to search

• Products
• Information/Education
• Pages

All experiences should use the same engine

• Search Bar
• Category Navigation
• Product filtering/discovery

UX should be adaptive & personalized

• Known/Unknown user
• Mobile/Web
• Aware of customer contracts & catalog

One single destination for what you need to find

• Merged Product & Marketing sites
• Content / Products / Info / Support in one place

Prioritization is key

• Inventory / out of stock visibility - Piloting
• Promotions - In progress
• Tracking visibility - Kicking off now
• Paying invoices online - Kicking off now

Setting ourselves up for the future

Predictive analytics/Demand planning

How can we use search data as a feedback loop on demand?

• Search volumes and conversions
• Inventory Awareness
• No results terms that indicate catalog expansion opps

Marketing insights

Trends in search that can translate to marketing

• “Mothers day”
• “Purple sprinkles”
• “Fourth of July”

Faster innovation

How can we stay ahead?

• Personalization
• Dynamic merchandising
• Natural language AI
• “Long tail” Search intent

Key Takeaways

One place to find it all

• Your site is a 24/7 sales rep
• Multiple locations/siloed content leads to customer friction
• “If I can’t find it, you must not have it”

Speed of iteration > Functionality on day 1

• “Box checking” matters much less than the end user experience
• No two experiences are the same
• You must be able to react to customers

Discovery Matters

• Doubled sales YoY for 3 consecutive years
• Exceeded 50% adoption target
• Delivered net sales lift target