Redesigning the shopping experience in time for the holidays

Selling custom, configurable products means shoppers have a lot of choices to make. While this lets customers get exactly what they want, they can also easily get overwhelmed without an easy-to-use, straightforward interface. For a leading furniture retailer, its product configurator was falling short of expectations and customer satisfaction scores weren’t as high as they could be.

To enhance customers’ online shopping experiences, the retailer sought the help of Blue Acorn iCi to redesign its website’s product configurators, listing pages, and detail pages. But timing was tight. The holiday season was fast approaching, and the client’s website needed to be ready before the Black Friday rush.

As a Platinum Partner in the Adobe Solution Partner Program, Blue Acorn iCi was well-equipped to handle the necessary upgrades to the client’s existing Adobe Commerce infrastructure and support a better customer experience. And, while Blue Acorn iCi and the client decided to keep the same configurator functionality already familiar to customers, the team wanted to implement a sleeker frontend to work hand-in-hand with the optimized backend to improve performance.

With a firm deadline and end-of-year code freezes in mind, Blue Acorn iCi sourced additional resources to help streamline processes and prevent overwhelming the client’s existing team. Because of this — and coupled with the ease-of-use of using Adobe solutions — the redesign was delivered just in time.

The backend optimizations that the team completed dramatically improved the speed and performance of the client’s website, helping customers more quickly and easily customize and purchase the products they wanted. Plus, the revitalized customer journey for both desktop and mobile devices fundamentally upgraded the user experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and revenue within the first few weeks of the website launch.

The redesign’s impact quickly became clear after the holiday rush: the client saw a 41% year-over-year increase in sales during Cyber Week and a 26% increase in conversion rate with desktop visitors. Mobile device metrics increased even further, with a 31% jump in conversion rate for the client’s top-selling products. On top of that, the client enjoyed a 9.7% increase in orders in the month of the launch, which added $2.1 million to their bottom line.

With the redesign, Blue Acorn iCi and the client have strengthened their partnership and paved the way for easier maintenance and upgrades, freeing the teams to be more strategic. As a result, the teams can focus on developing future features and innovating new ways to improve the customer experience.