Replatforming and omnichannel: the Accent Group online store upgrade case study

How omnichannel marketing and an online store upgrade grew the profit of a footwear company from

Is it easy to sell famous-brand footwear to a young audience?

The new generation shops in a new way: they want vivid emotions during the purchase.

The product no longer matters as much as the experience of the process. Moreover, they are online all the time, and new tech features appear every day that you must watch closely.

Let's look at an interesting case of how Accent Group grew footwear sales 10x with modern IT solutions.

They distribute footwear from well-known brands: Timberland, The Athlete's Foot, Platypus, Hype DC, Skechers and others.

Each of the ten brands Accent Group works with has its own character: from laid-back Vans to rebellious Dr. Martens and iconic Sperry Top-Sider. In 2016 the company gave serious thought to digital transformation. Online commerce was gaining traction, and competitors were ramping up sales through their own online stores, social networks and marketplaces like eBay.

Although Accent Group already had an online store, it needed to be modernized to meet modern requirements and hold its market share.

Customer behavior was changing too. Accent Group noticed that attention was now shifting from products and goods toward services and user experience.

Service quality had to improve at every touchpoint, and brand interaction had to be made as pleasant as possible. A deep understanding of the target audience's needs and overall retail trends marked the start of a major digital experiment.

The first to move onto the new online track was Platypus — Australia's No. 1 multi-brand footwear retailer.

After the project's success, the brand The Athlete's Foot joined too — the largest in

an athletic footwear retailer in Australia.

Until 2016, online sales ran on an old static website.

A static site consists of unchangeable (static) HTML pages.

Its main drawback is the difficulty of making any changes: adding fresh content, altering the structure, and so on.

As load on such a site grows, it becomes hard to maintain code quality and keep the project coherent.

Accent Group planned to scale, and the developers needed to migrate the old online store to a flexible enough platform able to support business growth.

At the same time, most of the traffic came from mobile phones and tablets.

It was crucial to account for this: adapt the UX design, add the relevant features, and make page loads as fast as possible.

Inventory management across a network of 430 offline stores plus the online store was very hard to run.

The data volume is large, and records could be kept in different information systems. Yet proper order fulfillment requires seeing the stock of every item in real time.

Omnichannel interaction with users needed to be digitized to easily collect and analyze data from all sources.

This was meant to boost operational efficiency.

When data from every store, the website, email and all other sources is integrated into a single software suite with CRM, ERP and BPM, the company holds all the cards to cut costs and grow sales.

Alongside digitalization, Accent Group began rethinking the role of their retail stores.

Instead of treating stores as separate retail outlets, they began thinking of them as distribution centers.

The decision was made to implement click & collect (online order with pickup from an offline store), and the software had to support this option.

Even as sweeping changes were being prepared, it was vital to preserve the key thing — each brand's authenticity. The online store had to convey the same emotions and broadcast the same values as offline. With such an impressive list of tasks, the developers got to work.

Accent Group placed its online store on Magento Commerce 2.

It attracted them with its open source code, as well as its flexibility and scalability.

In addition, Magento is the world's most popular CMS for eCommerce projects!

It is an entire global ecosystem — over 4,800 extensions (apps) are available from the Magento admin interface, including: WCM/DXP, PIM, CPQ, reviews and ratings, a marketing hub and analytics.

All data was migrated from the old static website to Magento Commerce 2.

Such a migration is a fairly complex process, but a skilled vendor can deliver a smooth, seamless transition in an average of 2-3 months.

The migration process from other CMS platforms to Magento usually consists of the following stages: gathering business requirements; assessing current functionality; data migration; design; development; integrations.

The needs of mobile users were taken into account.

Specifically for them, the developers deeply integrated the site with Instagram and created a theme that looks like a mobile app.

Orders in the online store can be managed from a mobile device: online shopping has become more convenient and easier.

Implemented click & collect and expanded it to click & dispatch.

In less than a year after introducing click & collect (online ordering with pickup), the share of such sales grew to 20% of total online transactions.

This idea was expanded and now includes click & dispatch - delivery of online orders directly to customers, accounting for 30-50% of digital sales since launch.

Combined data from all customer interaction channels.

All physical sales channels were integrated with online channels.

Several key integrations were developed to support the brand's omnichannel strategy, including Apparel ERP and Temando Fulfillment.

Now Magento simplifies inventory management and helps with logistics.

The task was to bring the physical shoe-fitting experience online. In the end, an integrated system was created, consisting of MyFit devices in stores (with a pressure sensor and motion analysis), as well as an online application and a MyFit module.

This took customer service to a new level.