The Solution
After evaluating multiple platforms, Coastal Farm and Ranch selected Episerver for Content Management (CMS) and Digital Commerce Experience Platform (DXP), inRiver for Product Information Management (PIM), and Tecsys as their Distributed Order Management System (DOM/OMS). Luminos Labs was selected to guide, plan, design, and implement the new digital commerce solution.
For the build phase, Coastal Farm and Ranch used the Luminosity Episerver Accelerator and the Luminosity inRiver Connector to accelerate delivery and time-to-market while including parallel development tracks to stabilize all platforms before the solution launch.
Features
Buy Online Pick Up In-Store
The website allows customers to buy their items online and pick them up at their local store when it’s convenient for them. A combined cart pickup and shipping system provide the user choice of shipping delivery or fulfillment from retail store locations.
Search and Personalization
Customers can use a faceted search that pre-populates with product and content recommendations. Coastal Farm and Ranch takes advantage of a key differentiator within Episerver by utilizing a tagging architecture for content that allows for content and products to live side-by-side.
Live Chat
A live chat supervision feature allows Coastal Farm and Ranch to have conversations directly with customers from the site to enable the high-touch customer service experience that differentiates the Coastal experience.
Integration Hub and Message Broker
Coastal Farm and Ranch implemented an integrated solution using Luminos Labs’ Integration Hub as its core module. This architecture promotes true decoupling between their current systems, enables rapid deployments with minimal friction to other systems, and better control on throughput and scalability of the overall solution.
The Message Broker is used to publish and consume system messages to reduce the dependency of file-based data feeds from the backend ERP. It also implements a load-leveling mechanism to handle the various API throughput rates to distribute processing of products, price, inventory, and order data across systems.
Multi-Platform Digital Commerce
It was critical to have all the core platforms integrated (Episerver, inRiver, Tecsys, Epicor) to create a seamless workflow for internal users and an engaging experience for end customers.
The Luminosity inRiver Connector integrated the PIM by using historical industry data to develop the base model. As more vendor product data comes in, the model is continuously adjusted.
All systems launched simultaneously, including the integration with the existing Epicor Eagle ERP system (on-premise), because of strong communication and coordination with different teams and vendors to implement the many integration flows and data transfers using scalable enterprise architecture.
