commercetools has been working with Baby Bunting for the last 12 months to organise its entire commerce technology stack. Baby Bunting general manager for digital, Rod Williams reflects on the partnership and shares some early results at the recent eTail Australia, WBR Worldwide event.
“Three years ago, headless commerce was an emerging concept – something on the bleeding edge only if you had the resources like an Amazon or Nike could you take it on and succeed,” Williams said.
“The concept of headless got me interested – what if there was a better way to implement and run your ecommerce technology and not be locked into a single vendor? What if you could break the cycle of re-platforming every few years?”
Less than 12 months ago, Baby Bunting embarked on the implementation of its new composable commerce architecture. Today, it is live across Australia and New Zealand, powering millions of visits and tens of thousands of omnichannel orders a month.
“During Covid, like many other retailers, our online channel has grown quickly with online sales increasing from 11.9% of total sales pre-Covid to 23.8% of total sales in the first half of FY22. During FY21 we had 30 million visits to our website and processed 600,000 orders.”
With this growth, Baby Bunting rapidly outgrew its ecommerce platform implemented 10 years ago. Even small changes to the platform were slow, expensive and ran the risk of bringing down the online business, according to Williams.
“The commerce platform that enabled our online growth and success for 10 years had become our number one risk and constraint, so in 2020, it opened the door to look at how composable commerce architecture could be the right way forward,” he said.
“There were a couple of key advantages that quickly stood out. Firstly, the flexibility to choose best of breed services and bring them together to meet our needs both today and into the future. Secondly, the agility to leverage software with everything as a service and manage and develop each component on an independent roadmap.
“Thirdly, we could easily start to integrate into our enterprise systems by leveraging our existing services oriented architecture. Lastly, we didn’t want to go through another wholesale e-commerce re-platform project in another 5 or 10 years – it takes too much time, energy, and money and should not be required now we can quickly adapt and flex our composable commerce architecture, who will now leverage our composable commerce architecture to be continually improving our omni-channel customer experiences.
“We’re now a month in of having launched in Australia and that agility is real. We are now releasing quicker than ever and particularly releases to our frontend experience – what used to take months is now taking weeks and we knowour velocity will continue to improve. Revenue, order volumes and conversion are all strong and we are confident that will continue to grow further as we best leverage and unlock the capabilities of our new composable commerce architecture.”