Combining clicks and bricks with a headless architecture

Finding the perfect chair or sofa

In the morning, it’s the place where you drink your first cup of coffee. And in the evening, it’s where you relax. Your living room. With that fine chair or sofa that matches your interior perfectly. But how do you ensure, as a company, that your customers can also find that perfect chair or sofa online? Prominent came to us with that question and wanted to create an online experience. One that does justice to the experience of visiting the physical shops. And, if desired, one that extends into the shop as well.

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Challenge

A seamless online experience. Starting from a physical store to an online purchase and vice versa.

Solution

A highly immersive experience resulting in higher conversion rates. A headless e-commerce platform. The right combination of software solutions.

A seamless online experience

Prominent’s platform should be an experience. Customers should be able to find everything they need online: beautiful images, clear information and appropriate advice. And if they would like to look further offline, they should be able to arrange that in just a few clicks. After all, a high quality chair or sofa is an expensive purchase and assumes a prominent place in a living room and in the lives of its owners. Therefore, it’s a product that the target group does not easily buy online. We collaborated with Prominent to investigate which technology could be used to seamlessly integrate the ‘clicks and bricks’ experience to achieve the highest conversion rates for Prominent.

A headless architecture

The solution was headless architecture. The previous webshop of Prominent was built with Adobe Commerce. Adobe Commerce is an e-commerce software package, which already includes several services out-of-the-box. This is a good choice when your main focus is online sales. But when creating an online experience, where your brand and your physical shops are just as important, a headless architecture could be a better fit, because in a headless architecture, the back-end (the content on the platform) is disconnected from the front-end (the design of the platform) and only connected by APIs and there is a wide range of choice in technology. This means that the solutions that best meet the needs and wishes of end users can be chosen.

The right combination of software solutions

In collaboration with Prominent, we were able to choose the systems that would best combine e-commerce, an online experience and the physical shops. For the e-commerce part of the platform, we stayed with the powerful software package Adobe Commerce. For example for placing and processing orders or for implementing price promotions. In addition, we used the Product Information Management (PIM) system Akeneo to display product information on the platform. For the experience, we used Storyblok, a headless CMS that displays content such as images and texts in an attractive way. We also created an online appointment form using Azure Functions, so that customers can make an appointment in the shop, or even at home.

Following trends quickly, easily and independently

In the dynamic retail sector, it is also important to be able to follow trends quickly, easily and independently. This is another advantage of combining different back-end systems. Prominent can add and edit all content in Storyblok themselves. Moreover, they can, for example, compose product detail pages and landing pages for new marketing campaigns quickly and independently. This is possible because of a combination of Adobe Commerce and Algolia, a SaaS solution for search and catalogues, which allows Prominent to position and sort products themselves.

Responding to future market developments

Just like the fast-moving retail sector, Prominent is always on the move and wants to keep optimising. Thanks to the headless architecture, developments can be implemented quickly. Examples include new functionalities such as product configurators or personalising product detail pages based on customer data. Other advantages are that an app can be developed relatively quickly and easily or that content can be displayed on interactive screens in stores. This is possible because in a headless architecture, the front-end, in this case based on Next.js and React, is disconnected from the back-end. This means that all kinds of front-ends and applications can be made easily. With all these possibilities, Prominent can further strengthen the interaction between the physical shops and the online platform to be able to better meet the ever-changing needs of the target group in the future.