One of Portugal's leading health, wellness and beauty retailers relied on Create IT to enhance their digital customer experience and drive sales through innovative solutions. This collaboration aimed to deliver new features to the business, focusing on back-in-stock notifications to keep customers informed and engaged.
Leveraging advanced technologies and close cooperation with partners, Create IT successfully implemented a solution that is already resulting in new revenue streams.
The digital channel is today a cornerstone in retail sales, offering convenience, global reach and accessibility 24/7. This makes it imperative for businesses to continuously invest in their infrastructure to stay competitive. And this company knows it well.
The primary challenge was the need to quickly deliver a feature that would notify customers when out-of-stock items were available again. This functionality was crucial for maintaining customer interest and driving sales.
"We needed a solution that could make the team as independent as possible while minimizing costs and ensuring rapid deployment," explains David Pereira, Software Developer @Create IT.
Another challenge was integrating multiple Salesforce services - Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud - without causing delays or increasing complexity.
Ensuring that the email notifications were designed to minimize noise and spam was also critical.
To address these challenges and meet the client's needs, Create IT helped to develop a fully tailored solution. As David Pereira notes, “We worked on a document with four possible solutions and presented them to our client. The goal was to showcase the cost and other trade-offs of each one to help decision makers. We ended up choosing a custom solution to reduce costs and time to market.”
Using Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud as the core e-commerce platform, Create IT’s dedicated team work closely with the client and other partners to implement a module that allows logged-in users to subscribe to back-in-stock notifications.
When a user clicks the "notify me" button, an event is triggered and published via an internal HTTP API to a Kafka message broker, which is then consumed by a middleware and sent to Marketing Cloud with Salesforce REST APIs.
The custom journey in Salesforce Marketing Cloud ensures that emails are sent at optimal times but without guaranteeing stock availability at the time of email opening, thus managing customer expectations effectively.
“A unique characteristic of our solution is that this feature is only available to logged in users. We made this decision in order to not have a recaptcha or another system to prevent spam,” says David Pereira.
The website uses Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud as the core e-commerce solution with SFRA, alongside many back-end services. A significant aspect of this implementation was the upgrade to the latest SFRA version (v6), which was completed in partnership with OSF Digital.
Other technologies used include Javascript; Node.js; webpack; Vue.js; Bootstrap 5 and Jenkins.
Besides this specific project, Create IT has been focused on bringing several innovations to life and maintaining the solution in production. “Our team is at the forefront of the value stream of our client”, highlights Pedro Vala, CTO @Create IT.
The implementation resulted in various outcomes. The retail chain can now dynamically change the sorting rules for product listing pages, leading to increased revenue. Products, even those currently out of stock but popular, can be highlighted on the first page, driving customer interest and engagement for future orders.
A vast number of features were successfully delivered, “These (features) collectively enhanced the client’s e-commerce capabilities, driving more sales and improving customer satisfaction,” concludes David Pereira.
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