"Having Norce Commerce as your backend system with the option of coupling it to any choice of frontend gives you tremendous flexibility. Thanks to Norce, we’ve been able to scale up our ecommerce quickly and gained real traction"
"Norce Commerce APIs mean we can use several external services quickly and easily, such as Urb-IT and our shop-in-shop solution in stores. The customer experience is most important for us and Urb-IT has given us a new way of interfacing with consumers. Those companies that best adapt to what customers want will be the winners"
"Our development has gone very well, which has been enabled by our having such an agile set up. If we had been working in an old traditional retail environment, we would never have achieved these results. Our online flow helps enable our agile approach while high scalability means we can grow faster online than ever before".
Pelle Pettersson, Head of Omnichannel & eCommerce, Cervera
Challenges
To create a modern store concept
The boundary between ecommerce and physical retailing is gradually becoming blurred. As a Cervera customer, whether you buy online or in a traditional store, you should be able to buy exactly the same products. The opportunity to link together ecommerce and physical stores via innovative solutions was a key factor in being able to create a modern store concept. As Cervera wants to become a complete omnichannel retailer, its customer offer has to work in any channel customers choose.
Strategy to broaden the range
While traditional stores have limited space to display products, no such constraints apply to online stores when it comes to presenting an entire product range. To be successful, Cervera needed to develop a long-term strategy to expand its range and bolster its processes and work flows to enable physical stores to offer the same full range.
Technological support and integration
Cervera wants to provide an exceptional customer experience and therefore wanted a site optimised for mobile devices with a clearer sales focus and better product filtering and navigation. Improved shopping basket processing for campaign codes and coupons plus gift card functions were also on the wish list.
The ecommerce solution needed to be integrated with all other important Cervera systems such as CRM for the loyalty programme, and the new Third-party logistics supplier’s WMS system for goods deliveries. Integration covered products, customer orders, stock balances, prices, delivery notifications and purchase orders. An important aspect for the choice of platform was to enable agile frontend development without affecting the business logic.
Logistics
In addition to the central warehouse, third-party distribution, a so-called 3PL solution, was also required to ensure the supply chain for the expanded product range. Cervera needed to move from a decentralised solution, with online order inventory at its respective stores, to a centralised solution with an ecommerce inventory.
Solutions
Headless ecommerce platform
Cervera makes frequent and regular updates to its website and launches a new version almost daily. This would simply not be possible if modifications in the frontend affected ecommerce, hence the importance of decoupling the business logic from the user interface. By choosing a headless platform, Cervera can make modifications to the frontend without this affecting the core itself. As Norce Commerce is decoupled from the frontend and manages the underlying ecommerce functionality and business logic separately, you gain far greater frontend flexibility.
Results
Advantages of headless ecommerce
Norce Commerce flexible APIs have enabled Cervera to build a solution that best meets their needs with specialised services and systems that can be continuously developed. This gives Cervera the flexibility to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise. The solution is integrated with third party services and Cervera can maintain a rapid rate of frontend change. This high development tempo is possible because modifications at the frontend do not affect functionality in the ecommerce engine such as order flows.
