Amart Furniture – the start of a digital transformation journey
While modernising their eCommerce platform, Amart Furniture embarked on a digital transformation journey to position themselves as a digitally driven and customer centric business.
From humble beginnings in 1970, Amart Furniture’s mission has been to help Australians transform their houses into fabulous homes without breaking the bank. Their promise comes with affordable pricing for everyone and quality to make it worth the buy. Amart Furniture have 69 locations nationwide, and are one of Australia’s leading furniture, bedding and outdoor retailers. Shoppers love Amart Furniture because the experience is easy, fuss-free, and super convenient.
Amart Furniture’s goals included a migration from a legacy eCommerce platform to Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) B2C, and a marketing platform migration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The digital adoption of the solution is the key to success now more than ever. It also required the Amart Furniture team to be enabled to take on complete ownership of the solution implemented as well as being able to configure new journeys on Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It was critical the solution was able to support the display of inventory and pricing from over 70 stores and 3 distribution centres to customers based on their location without impacting performance.
Having an eCommerce platform that was 8 years old meant we were using base technology, and processes, that had been superseded a number of times. Modernising allowed us to stop worrying about the running the underlying technology stack and concentrate on making improvements that help our customers and internal team members.
Deloitte leveraged their Retail 360 CIP Accelerator to meet the ambitious goals of Amart Furniture;
- Launch the new eCommerce platform within 26 weeks
- Launch the new Marketing platform within 8 weeks
- Enable the Amart Furniture team to be fully enabled to operate and maintain each solution after the project finished
- Offer a best in class customer experience online
A new eCommerce storefront with industry-leading functionality, offering customers the latest inventory details from each of the 70+ store locations around Australia based on the customers geo-Location. The online site now houses a delivery window where customers can select the exact day their items are delivered, a feature which no other large Australian furniture retailer can offer. The new site is a mobile-first, responsive site with an enhanced finance experience at Checkout including several different payment methods for customers to choose from.
The Marketing platform allows the Amart Furniture team to communicate with their customers across key journeys and marketing campaigns in a system which is fully configurable to meet constantly changing customer and business needs. By choosing Salesforce as a partner, Amart were able to blend the Deloitte delivery expertise with industry leading technology which 23% increase in online revenue, driven by higher average order value (+5%) and conversion rate (+28%)1, as well as 16% lower customer attrition, increasing trust and loyalty with their customer base, preventing lost sales2
One of the key takeaways was the need to slow down during the project to allow the technical solution to match the design and experience. This meant the Amart Furniture and Deloitte teams had to work together to extend the project by several weeks without having major impacts to the team’s activities or budget.
Without this, it would have been impossible to offer the customer experience the Amart Furniture team needed for their customers, which is exemplified by the way both teams came together to deliver the customer experience and technical architecture to create an unrivalled furniture shopping experience in the Checkout for Amart Furniture’s customers.
Working with Deloitte, Amart Furniture were able to transform their digital offering not just for their customers, but for their staff as well. Equipped with best in class technology tailored specifically to their customer’s needs, Amart Furniture can now be proactive in their digital capabilities to surprise and delight their customers which still offering the quality and value their customers expect.
Deloitte’s expertise in Design, UX and Integration has meant that Amart Furniture’s online platforms are performing above expectations in the following areas:
- Conversion rate +31.21%
- Transactions +55.29%
- Revenue +61.59%
1. Independent report “Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study”,
2. Third party 2019 Global Survey of Salesforce Customers (3,384 respondents)
Deloitte Digital’s knowledge of SalesForce Commerce Cloud enabled us to come up to speed on the to-be process quickly. This gave our team time to work on our internal systems and integrations without having to spend extra time researching the optimal solution. The Deloitte team supplemented our internal team well. They had the experience to answer most questions we posed, and for those they didn’t know straight away, they knew someone who would have the answer. - Stephen Formosa, General Manager - Information Technology