The secret to personalized, loyalty-building ecommerce

Ecommerce sites are a key component of the omnichannel toolkit, offering a quick and convenient way for customers to browse and buy the products they want. But when it comes to developing those experiences, many brands have been limited by restrictive architectures that do not allow for innovation.

While working as a developer for Gucci, Filippo Conforti saw the potential to innovate ecommerce UX to deliver custom, luxury experiences online through an API driven infrastructure, while unifying CX across all channels and touchpoints, including physical stores.

Now CEO and co-founder of Commerce Layer, Filippo talks to CX Network about UX innovations, composable and headless ecommerce and the future of omnichannel.

CX Network: What are the core principles of a great user experience (UX) in ecommerce?

Filippo Conforti: Great ecommerce UX is about making the ideal experiences that brands might imagine possible, but that's a pretty high-level statement without a concrete example! When it comes to a service like Commerce Layer, it means that the underlying technology that powers that imagined experience should not limit the idea or prevent anything from happening.

Therefore, great ecommerce UX should incorporate things like product stories told with great content, localized promotion and pricing, accurate stock availability messages, a fast checkout process that utilizes locally relevant payment options in local currencies, a customer portal with status updates on orders, and other small stuff like local shipping options and tax calculations.

All of this should happen very quickly on the front-end because we all know how slow site speeds can impact sales. This brings us back to the high-level point – the best ecommerce UX is what we call "content led commerce". It is where the product story shines through a beautiful user experience and the underlying tech enables that, allowing for testing and optimization.

CX Network: How should organizations refine their ecommerce architecture and what are some of the key tools they should use in this work?

Filippo Conforti: Focusing on luxury experiences and fashion, there is a new approach to ecommerce development emerging called composable commerce. This is a way to select the best tools for your needs in order to compose a unique customer experience. Instead of buying a platform that delivers a templated experience, you buy best-in-class tools for content management, search, images, commerce and so on, and you can really leverage highly focused analytics for each aspect of the customer experience and compose every aspect of that experience.

Brands should absolutely choose the composable commerce approach.

The selection of the best-of-need (i.e. what a brand needs versus all-in-one solutions) microservices like a CMS, a commerce engine, a search provider, personalization, front-end framework, image host and so on, enables the best UX to be created and delivered. This is possible because of the clean separation of concerns. A CMS manages content. A commerce engine like Commerce Layer manages the commerce data and transactions. Search does search. And so on.

RELATED CONTENT: What is omnichannel? A CX Network guide

CX Network: There has been a surge in new platforms, channels and devices over recent years and now there are brands looking at AR and VR experiences. How can these be integrated with the wider digital CX architecture?

Filippo Conforti: After Apple’s Apple Vision Pro announcement this is technically achievable.

There is another term, headless commerce, which is a way of separating the presentation of your experience from the logic behind it, so the front-end is decoupled from the back-end commerce functionality and can be updated or edited without interfering with the back-end.

Traditionally it is a website but if you wear Apple vision pro the interface is different.
It is a different type of experience and interaction that cannot be achieved through a traditional monolithic platform that is designed to be the website because this is not a website

Right now, we are not sure what Apple Vision Pro is, but as an example, by separating the way you interact with an experience and by separating the experience from the engine that powers it, is the key to be open to any type of experience and technically this is done with APIs so instead of having a platform that delivers and is linked to one experience, ideally you want to sell more tools in a composable scenario and this can provide the capabilities through APIs so these capabilities can be injected into any type of interaction, for example the metaverse or Apple Vision Pro, in the same way that it happens on a website or mobile app.

CX Network: If we look more broadly at the role of ecommerce as a contact channel, what do you believe customers want from ecommerce experiences?

Filippo Conforti: They want to be recognised as one customer across all channels. These can be digital or physical channels – omnichannel often refers to digital, but if you have physical stores. You want that seamless experience between online and offline and the customer wants to be recognized as one customer with different channel options.

It should feel like a single journey that can go in any direction, whether that requires visiting a store or wearing some kind of device. It is something that can be very antiquated, but you want to see the consistency of the experience across all the channels.

CX Network: While working at Gucci you were part of the team that redesigned the brand’s ecommerce experience. What were the objectives of the project and how did you achieve them?

Filippo Conforti: An online shopping experience is not just one experience – it is made of many micro-experiences.

The main goal was to create an outstanding experience and to differentiate that experience for the customers online the same way as the brand differentiates the physical, offline shopping experience. This was 10 years ago, and Gucci still has the same experience today just with some iterations.

That was one driver from the digital department and the company in general, then there were other requirements, such as having a faster website, which is part of the experience. Security, operations, the time to market, the speed to release new features and innovate the experience with new features were all considerations, too.

RELATED CONTENT: How Mandarin Oriental digitalized its luxury hotel experience

CX Network: How did you measure the success of the new user experience and customer’s satisfaction?

Filippo Conforti: If you see your business growing it is an important signal, but when it comes to customer service in the luxury world there is a strong relationship between some types of customers, VIPs for example, who are known by name by the customer service department. These are some of the most demanding customers! But they speak to customer service about their experiences – beyond any technology that you can put on your website, they are having an old-fashioned conversation with a very important customer who tells you how the experience was. It is the best way to measure the success of the experience.

CX Network: After Gucci you co-founded Commerce Layer, a headless commerce platform and order management system that you can use to design any customer experience, both online and in-store. Tell us more.

Filippo Conforti: I started while working at Gucci.

To achieve the experience that the business demanded we had to solve a technical problem in that the experience was not designed to be delivered with the templated approach that was provided by a monolithic platform.

We started talking about how we can implement new experiences, but it was like making a square peg fit in a round hole. The big question was how to decouple the front-end experience from the platform itself and the only way was to create APIs on top of the platform so the front-end can use those APIs and implement the experience.

We created the headless platform essentially and thought this approach is not bad at all. It was very powerful, so we started thinking during the Gucci.com project there were a lot of time pressures and we did not have the time to engineer those APIs in the best way, even if they did the job and they are still there 10 years later.

Then we started thinking why not create a platform that does exactly that? Focuses on the commerce capabilities and exposes those capabilities through APIs so that you can create an experience like we did with Gucci, or any other experience on a channel that will become popular in future.

Mobile was already a thing when we did Gucci.com in 2013 and 2014. As a channel, mobile was already bringing in more than 50 percent of the traffic but not more than 50 percent of the sales.

It was during those years that mobile became very popular, but there was no metaverse!
The beauty of it is that by decoupling the experience from the engine, you futureproof your business and architecture. Because you can connect to anything anybody can invent to create a new interaction, both online and in store.

I believe these two channels are not alternative, but that they should work together in a seamless way and have some digital experiences at the same time.

You go online and have an interaction with the store so you can get a phone call or book an appointment and finalize your purchase with a white glove treatment in store. That should be very well integrated together.

RELATED CONTENT: The 6 biggest trends influencing customer loyalty in 2023

CX Network: How would you describe the state of omnichannel retail at present?

Filippo Conforti: We have been speaking about omnichannel for years, but it is not there yet.

I think that now we have a real chance to create real omnichannel experiences, technically you cannot be omnichannel if you are only linked to one channel and again, the only way to be omnichannel is to separate or decouple the channel from the engine. With the rise of APIs, headless is technically the only way to be omnichannel.

It is still early but the technology is mature enough now to deliver this type of experience.
Hopefully now is the time to implement and execute on a true omnichannel experience.

CX Network: To conclude, where do you believe the future of ecommerce lies and what do you believe the future of ecommerce is?

Filippo Conforti: In general, I think it will become more and more distributed and it will no longer be one primary channel, like the .com website. Today it is still about the .com website but in future it will be built with many micro experiences and a connected journey, rather than one single macro experience.