Furniture brand Bolia.com doubles revenue with Unified Commerce
Bolia.com, a Scandinavian home décor and furniture brand has transformed how we create our homes by transforming how we shop. How? They’ve upended the traditional retail furniture industry by unifying their digital and in-store experiences and creating delightful and purchase-inspiring journeys for their customers. They’re reaping the benefits of this transformation, too; in their 2016 report, Bolia.com boasted double-digit sales growth achieving $94 million (DKK 657 million) in revenue.
Bolia.com’s unified commerce solution, powered by Episerver’s Digital Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics AX, and Microsoft Azure is used as the consumer-facing eCommerce site, in-store point-of-sale solution for their 40+ stores, and as their B2B eCommerce solution for dealers and retailer partners globally.
Extraordinary experiences
So, what is at the heart of this strategy? For Bolia.com, it’s about creating inspiring and immersive buying experiences whether their customer is browsing online, or considering a purchase in a Bolia.com store, or visiting one of Bolia.com’s many independent dealers. The primary proposition being that consumers should get to “live as they choose;” an empowering context for Bolia.com’s affluent consumer base who chooses which of the 40 designers, 3 seasonal stories, and 500,000 product variations to create their home from. Bolia.com’s International Marketing & Omnichannel Director, Line Bering Larsen, puts it this way, “Our focus is fully on creating extraordinary experiences for our customers wherever we meet them.”
Bolia.com’s unified commerce strategy has three aspects:
- Web experiences
- In-store experiences
- Dealer experiences
Web experience
Apart from being visually stunning and content rich, Bolia.com’s site is extremely focused on combining design aesthetic and product assortment to inspire purchases. “Bolia.com has become a primary case for what is possible when you put customer experience at the center of your digital strategy and when you put digital strategy at the center of your business operations,” according to Ed Kennedy, Senior Director eCommerce at Episerver. “They’ve shown what an innovative brand can do with scalable commerce solutions like Episerver and Microsoft.”
Because Bolia.com’s product specifications are synchronized between Episerver and Microsoft Dynamics, customers can design a made-to-order piece online and have it shipped to their home. The “customizer” experience also calculates delivery dates before assembly begins using data from Microsoft Dynamics AX. This made-to-order customizer experience is responsible for half of Bolia.com’s online revenue.
Consumers can design and customize their own made-to-order furniture using the Bolia.com customizer
In addition to made-to-order purchases, Bolia.com also enables click-and-collect options for smaller accessories. Consumers can reserve lamps, stools, lighting, and other smaller items to be picked up in store which drives in-store foot traffic. When ordering, the customer can see the item is in stock at the desired store and pick up products within hours. This capability is possible because Microsoft Dynamics AX and Episerver have synchronized inventory records for each store.
Bolia.com’s design blog connects home furniture ideas and commerce experiences. Bolia saw a 56% increase in mobile revenue after launching their unified commerce solution.
A sample blog post on Bolia.com which announces their Spring line and products that can be purchased online or in store.
Store experience
Bolia.com has also delivered several in-store innovations from their unified commerce solution. In-store associates utilize mobile devices that render the Bolia.com website while assisting customers visiting their physical locations. The Bolia.com website contains more than 500,000 product variations available to the associate to share with consumers. In addition, associates utilize the website as their in-store point-of-sale system to place orders for customers including scheduling delivery of made-to-order products to the customer’s home. Several other innovations have become possible by delivering a unified commerce solution.
“What impresses me most about Bolia.com is how they’ve brought design concepts of simplicity and excellence to their technology implementation, skipping traditional data-silos and status-quo tech, in an effort to simplify technology that in-turn, simplifies the customer experience,” said Kennedy.
In store associates use a unique one-page checkout to take orders in-store including scheduled delivery
“Bolia Chipcard” gets rid of cash registers and builds their customer data mine: The Bolia Chipcard feature enables in-store customers to pay with their credit card. However, the payment processing is completed through the Episerver website. One key benefit of this approach is that Bolia.com combines in-store and web purchase into a single customer profile which allows Bolia.com to further understand and analyze sales data. A second benefit is that Bolia.com avoids costly transaction fees that come with traditional point-of-sale terminals. Thus, in the first three months of the Bolia Chipcard launch, Bolia.com processed over $11M USD (100M kr.) through their new payment solution.
Associates use the Bolia.com website as their point-of-sale terminal
Post-visit offers: Customers that leave the store without making a purchase will receive a personalized offer via email from the associate who worked with them, including the specifications of the purchase they were considering, and a discount offer to incentivize sales. The consumer can then complete this purchase online including scheduling their delivery. Offers that in-store associates send to customers after their visit are responsible for 29 percent of Bolia.com’s online revenue.
Bolia.com store associates can send offers to customers via the Episerver platform
B2B eCommerce
The third leg of their unified commerce experience is Bolia.com’s B2B experience which supports home decor dealers in the Bolia.com network. Bolia.com dealers can place orders on behalf of consumers using the website. However, their specific dealer login provides them with unique pricing and customer information including suggested MSRP and margin calculations. If a dealer is conducting a design consultation with a client, he or she can hide the pricing from the product detail page to show the consumer the customized furniture design that will be delivered to their home. Dealers, like associates in Bolia.com locations, can send personalized offers post-visit to incentivize purchases. This solution allows Bolia.com to access new markets without adding significant capital expenditures.
Larsen shares that “the new solution is easy to deploy our B2B platform in new markets and connect to retailers worldwide.” The result of this unified experience has been a 224 percent increase in revenue from dealers, adding 60 new dealers to their network in 17 countries.
Dealers experience a different product view than consumers shopping on Bolia.com
Getting from Omnichannel to Unified Commerce with Episerver and Microsoft
Episerver Digital Experience Cloud was selected by Bolia.com and their agency partner, Vertica. Vertica worked closely with Bolia.com’s team to craft the perfect experience, integrate Episerver with their Microsoft Dynamics AX solution, and deploy everything to the Azure cloud. The Bolia.com website is the central experience destination for desktop, mobile, and in-store experiences including product discovery and customer account management. Microsoft Dynamics AX is used to centralize all customer data, product data, and order data.
Running the solution on Microsoft Azure has helped Bolia.com deliver the high fashion, luxury experience they want. The Microsoft Azure CDN allows Bolia.com to present high definition video and product images with high page load speeds and rendering times. This could not be handled in any other way. Furthermore, Bolia.com is a large consumer of system resources because they have high-peak traffic times combined with a large product catalog assortment. Also, because the website is the basis of the entire business of Bolia.com in the physical stores, B2B and online – any down-time is unacceptable. This can only be achieved through Microsoft Azure.
Since launching the new solution, Bolia.com’s overall web conversion rate has increased 12 percent and mobile conversion rate has increased 58 percent.
For more information, visit www.Episerver.com for more information on how Episerver Digital Experience Cloud and Microsoft combine to empower Unified Commerce.
