Crafting a new, upgraded ecommerce customer journey

Every now and then, a perfect opportunity presents itself. For The Pixel, an Adobe Gold Solution Partner, this takes the form of using their ecommerce expertise to help retailers overcome their most complex and technically challenging projects.

One of The Pixel’s clients, a supplier for educational institutions in the United Kingdom, needed to introduce new systems for enterprise resource planning (ERP), product information management (PIM), and warehouse management, as well as move off their existing ecommerce site, which was nearing its end-of-life.

Upgrading and changing this many systems in their tech stack gave the client that perfect opportunity to fundamentally upgrade their way of working. To help determine exactly what needed to be done and how best to do it, The Pixel ran a series of workshops to completely map out the client’s current processes and systems and challenge preconceptions about business workflows to formulate an approach that would deliver the best possible results.

After the discovery phase, the teams decided the ambitious project would include three key components: building a new site on Adobe Commerce with custom-developed functionality, providing more autonomy for customers within an improved experience, and revitalizing the client’s internal workflows to drive efficiency across the board.

Once the project’s scope was determined, the first order of business was to identify the right customer model. Previously, the client did not sell directly to consumers, and the B2B selling experience was convoluted. To do this, The Pixel worked with its client to not only clean their customer data, but to also create a data model that was most representative of the client’s intended customer base.

Adding to project’s complexity was the fact that the client offers account-based pricing to many of the educational institutions it serves. To accommodate this added complexity, the client transferred orders to each institution’s procurement system, where they were reviewed, and once approved, sent back to the client for processing and fulfillment.

Keeping the client’s goals in mind, The Pixel developed and implemented new functionality on top of the already robust Adobe Commerce features to automate more complex workflows as well as order management and approval processes. The client now has a completely automated procurement process for institutions with advanced validation and error-handling to ensure any problems are dealt with quickly and efficiently.

For consumers who wish to purchase directly from the client, The Pixel created an entirely new customer registration process that uses an advanced address-matching algorithm to determine if a customer is more likely a B2B or B2C customer. The process then updates to match the determined customer type. Additionally, this new process removed the client’s original purchasing barriers, allowing new B2B accounts to now place their first order without requiring them to complete any time-consuming steps for manual setup.

Finally, the client also needed a way to integrate with its multiple financial management systems. The Pixel, combined with a number of third-party solutions, built a flexible and scalable solution that not only solved the client’s integration needs for today, but also prepared them to easily onboard new integrations in the future.

With its new site, increased automation, and improved business processes, the client now takes an even greater lead over its competition in the industry.

With better self-serve autonomy, new features such as more payment options, enhanced workflows for registration and procurement, and more, the client puts the customer at the heart of the entire online purchasing experience, improving their customer’s journey across the board.

Additionally, the client now has full visibility to their products, orders, and financial information, which is helping them to further improve the customer experience.