A deeper look,
The Challenge
Coastal knew that there was more to their business than just the brick-and-mortar spaces that they own and felt like they could do more.
This meant expanding into the digital world.
By breaking into the digital world, Coastal needed not only their loyalty program, known as Coastal Country Club, to work with an eCommerce website, but also integrating their in-store ERP system, OMS, and a PIM.
Starting from scratch in creating their eCommerce presence meant picking a platform to build on.
The Platform and Integrations
The platform chosen was Optimizely, a leading digital experience platform. Optimizely focuses on operating with a data-driven confidence to create hyper-personalized experiences for customers. This gives the Coastal team all the room to easily manage their website.
After deciding on a platform, our team was ready to implement and integrate their new ecommerce website with their in-store ERP, Order Management System (Tecsys), and PIM (inRiver).
Integrating and implementing these systems together happened with the use of a Middleware approach and Message Broker. The Middleware approach promotes a decoupling between their current systems and enables minimal friction for better control throughout the scalability of the overall solution.
The Message Broker reduces the dependency of file-based data feeds from the back-end ERP, while also implementing a load-leveling mechanism to distribute the processing of products, price, inventory, and order data across systems.
Omnichannel Experience
Buy Online, pick up in Store - Customers are also given the opportunity to buy online and pick up in-store when it is convenient for them.
Loyalty Program - Migrating their in-store systems with a now online presence meant creating an omnichannel experience for their customers. Customers who are regular shoppers of Coastal know that even before they had an eCommerce website, there was a loyalty program that customers could partake in every time they shopped in store. Bringing everything online, expanded the use of the loyalty program allowing customers the option to log in and view their available points at any time.
If a guest decided to shop in-store and provide their loyalty information, they would immediately see the updated points when logging into their account online after checkout. Coastal saw an increase in sign-ups for the loyalty program after launching the eCommerce website and can easily manage and update any part of the website thanks to their platform Optimizely.
E-Gift Cards - Along with the use of loyalty both online and in person, e-gift cards are also available for both uses in-person and online.
Online Promotions - When Coastal customers shop in-store, they simply need to show a military ID, or their regular ID to prove to the checkout attendant that they are eligible for a senior or military discount. In wanting to create the same experience for their online shoppers, ensuring that they can easily manage these types of transactions was a goal of ours, which is now offered for their customers online.
Product Recommendation - The Optimizely platform also has a product recommendation engine that recommends comparable products to guests who are browsing different items.
