Challenge

Previously on Salesforce Commerce Cloud using Page Designer, Serena & Lily had limited control over their site design and were restricted by templates unsuitable for the shopping experience that they wanted to deliver. Their content model could not evolve, and they needed to redesign wireframes to deliver the magazine-style imagery their customers expect from them, which they were unable to do in Page Designer.

With rich media experiences and the use of high-quality, magazine-style lifestyle imagery, Serena & Lily wanted full control over the frontend experience so they could create new content types and make creative changes with ease and pace.

By going headless Serena & Lily gained agility, speed, and creative freedom in their content management and delivery workflows.

Strategy

Success was delivered for Serena & Lily by migrating, renaming, and automating the creation of 6,000 product styles, each featuring a minimum of four alternate images. This approach was designed to enhance the customer experience, drive engagement, and increase conversions. The team also developed product sets used to recommend similar items to customers, further driving conversions and boosting average order value (AOV).

Additionally, 116 different content types were created, ranging from basic elements to a modular grid page that allowed for the nesting of various content types. This provided Serena & Lily with numerous templates to use immediately after implementation, empowering their marketing and merchandising teams to act swiftly. As a result, they were able to make instant content updates and build new content pages in less than half the time it previously took.

Moreover, this transition facilitated an exceptionally fast loading experience for Serena & Lily customers, handling an average of 275,000 asset requests per day.

Method

The MACH philosophy was leveraged by recognizing Serena & Lily's need for increased agility and speed in their content management workflows to meet the consistently evolving demands of their customers. By adopting a headless approach with Amplience’s CMS and Vercel as the frontend, Serena & Lily gained full control over their frontend experience, enabling them to make updates or changes without the delays previously caused by development time.

Additionally, the integration of Elastic Path for commerce brought together best-of-breed technologies, resulting in a flexible and scalable eCommerce architecture for Serena & Lily.