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How Composable Commerce is Playing a Key Role in SiteOne’s Digital Transformation

What can we learn from one company’s composable commerce journey?

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A recent Retail TouchPoints webinar offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of an active digital transformation. Through the lens of a case study of SiteOne, a landscape supply retailer, the roundtable format webinar explored the value of MACH and why a composable commerce architecture offers a better solution than a homegrown platform, the role of system integrators in a digital transformation, and the path SiteOne is pursuing as they undergo the process themselves.

Featuring SiteOne’s Scott Canney, Sr. Director of Product Management, commercetools’ Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy officer, and Orium’s Thomas Mulreid, Head of Sales, the webinar gave a practical, real-example look at what it truly means to modernize a tech stack and enable a future-ready commerce experience.

Why Did SiteOne Seek Out Digital Transformation?

SiteOne is a distributor of landscape supplies, making up roughly 16% market share of the category, and they have an acquisition-forward approach— which makes technology a pivotal but potentially complicated factor in their success. Through their acquisition of regional players with e-commerce capabilities, the company was facing the complexities of having to manage multiple platforms and strategies.

Following one such acquisition, SiteOne was faced with a tech stack that was, according to Canney, “Very slow to move, hard to support, a little bit outdated, and not on the cloud.” These difficulties raised a red flag for them, and with their sights set on more acquisitions in the future, they needed a new approach to managing their e-commerce strategy.

A second but equally important consideration for SiteOne was business empowerment. As Canney remarked, “[When] marketing wants to make a change, whether it’s a promotion or even content for the site, we have to go to dev, which isn’t good. That slows us down. It pulls devs away from other things that are critical to the business. So this was kind of the business case we began around.”

Looking to modernize across several legacy platforms and integrate into a cohesive whole system that could be flexed and leverage as the company’s needs continued to adapt and change in the years to come, SiteOne turned to headless technology solutions and a composable commerce framework.

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Planting the seeds of success

Built on MACH principles, a composable commerce architecture gives brands the ability to consume packaged business capabilities or chunks of functionality that roughly map back to an individual microservice.

“As a business user you can say, ‘I’d like to get the checkout from this vendor. I’d like to get the PIM from that vendor. I’d like to get the search from another vendor,’” said Goetsch. “It’s being able to compose that rich experience based on best-of-breed components, or you build those pieces yourself.” But piecing all those elements together so they can offer their full advantage requires knowledge and expertise.

That’s where a system integrator comes in.

Mulreid outlined how system integrators help companies like SiteOne with their digital transformation by assessing their current state and how well they function with their existing technologies, and then helping them transition into the new architecture approach.

“We support a lot around digital roadmaps,” Mulreid noted. “What is the right order of events to actually start these transitions into new architectures? How do you set up the right MACH architecture without having overlap of your technologies? How do you choose the right vendors?”

And the final piece of the puzzle, added Mulreid, is building out migration playbooks. “[T]hings that can help you de-risk the strategy, things that can take the fear out of the transition—whether it’s your people, whether it’s your change management, or frankly, whether it’s the features that are actually required.”

For brands new to the headless and composable commerce space, that kind of experience and insight is invaluable. And, as Canney noted, system integrators have another advantage. “They have these pre-established relationships [with vendors],” he notes. “They know who to pull in and when.” Meaning for a brand looking to make the switch, they’re not going in friendless and alone. They have a guide to help navigate the new terrain.

Tending to the transformation

Once the decision to leverage headless technologies in a composable commerce build is made, the fun (aka hard work) can truly begin. For SiteOne, Canney identified four steps in their digital transformation process:

1. Discovery process

In this phase, Canney explained, SiteOne looked at a number of different vendors. After determining that MACH was the way to go, they selected Orium as their integration and consultation partner and got to work straight away on laying out a roadmap and a phase 1 plan in order to kick off a proof of concept.

2. Proof of concept (PoC)

In Canney’s words, “This two-month PoC was wildly successful. It allowed us to de-risk taking the leap of faith into this technology. So we used commercetools, Amplience, Algolia, Vercel, and put those together. We were able to prove out some of the uniqueness of SiteOne, and then in doing so, built the business case to then go full steam into the actual migration of [our acquisition].”

3. Minimum viable product (MVP)

The next phase is going live with SiteOne’s MVP to help test and ease into the new system. “We have a better checkout experience—a lot more seamless. We have better search with Algolia and just overall page improvements, both with speed, SEO optimization, and so on,” said Canney.

4. Acquisition enhancement phase

Though the key advantage in a composable commerce replatform is there is no final step, the final step in the digital transformation is the ongoing enhancement and rollout of the improvements to other markets, new acquisitions, and more.

“After we do Canada,” Canney explained, “we’re not going to stop there. We allow and empower our acquisitions to maintain their brand or we co-brand.” The benefits to this, he remarks, are twofold: a reduced total cost of ownership and the ability to build a feature only once and send it off to any of their websites.

Reaping the rewards of composable

“I would argue,” said Goetsch, “that commerce is a commodity in the same way that load balancing is a commodity.” A bold statement, but not one without merit.

He continued, “No developer ever wants to get out of bed and fix a big queue of tickets around pricing errors in the shopping cart. For the same reason, you don’t build your load balancer from scratch. So buy the boring commoditized stuff from us as a vendor, build the differentiation, build the front-end.”

In other words, by opting to take a composed approach over DIY, retailers can save their time and resources for what really matters: the customer experience and brand differentiation.

While no two businesses are the same, case studies like this one demonstrate the many benefits of composable commerce in helping a business scale and future-proof its tech stack, especially in some of the typically underserved e-commerce approaches like an acquisition-forward strategy.

To hear more from the experts, you can watch the webinar on-demand.

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Leigh Bryant

Editorial Director, Composable.com

Leigh has been working in digital content and branding for over a decade, starting in retail before pivoting to the technology space where she has operated for over a decade as a writer, editor, and strategist.

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Adam Craveiro

Content Writer, Orium

As a former teacher and writer for a multimedia agency, I blend my passion for cutting-edge technology to create content that helps retailers navigate the composable commerce space. I leverage my background in adult education and personal experience with web development to cover the latest industry news and provide insight on the technologies shaping the commerce world at large.