The Largest Sitecore Implementation in the World

The customer is one of the world's largest fragrance manufacturers and retailers, selling over 400 products in 1200 stores in 37 countries. Besides brick-and-mortar stores, the company had multiple solutions for online sales.

When COVID-19 hit, the company faced several issues—the 1000+ offline stores were closed, luxury items were deemed nonessential, and businesses were forced to transition to digital as quickly as possible. The online stores were powered by different technologies, including Magento, Magento SaaS, WooCommerce, and OpenCart, and didn’t perform as an orchestrated system.

To recover from the crisis, the company set three business objectives:

• Optimize digital commerce operations to provide unforgettable brand experiences, just like in their stores
• Uplift revenue through omnichannel personalization for relevant and tailored B2C/B2B experiences 
• Deliver a future-ready commerce platform that helps accelerate market expansion and improves efficiency 

Partnering with Brimit, the company aimed to walk away from a scattered e-commerce approach to building a unified digital commerce architecture. The new solution was expected to provide consistent and personalized interaction across all channels and to be scalable and flexible enough to support rapid business growth and regional adaptations.

Our customer selected Sitecore as the vendor of choice to get what they needed—a scalable and unified platform that would enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency across the enterprise.

Brimit implemented, integrated, and set up eight SaaS products from Sitecore’s composable Digital Experience Platform:

Engagement Cloud

• Sitecore Send—working with email campaigns
• Sitecore CDP—tracking and analyzing online visitors’ behavior
• Sitecore Personalize—collecting customer data to personalize messaging and offers

Commerce Cloud 

• OrderCloud—creating customizable e-commerce, marketplace, and order management applications
• Discover—personalizing search and recommendations 

Content Cloud 

• XM Cloud—creating and storing content
• Content Hub Operations—managing content workflows 
• Content Hub DAM—managing digital assets

The new e-commerce solution was a 100% composable digital experience platform that met all the business objectives of the pandemic crisis.

Since the customer was determined to provide online experiences on the same level as in their brick-and-mortar stores, we decided to maximize the number of digital channels and touchpoints and enhance customer interactions. 

To achieve that, we worked on the following:

• Providing B2C, B2B, and franchise experiences with a single solution
• Adapting storefronts to specific regions
• Connecting to marketplaces
• Selling on vending machines, social networks, and smartwatches, and even in the metaverse

In short, we created a B2X commerce product with 25 B2C and 3 B2B storefronts.

The platform we came up with appeared to be the largest Sitecore implementation in the world.

Due to Sitecore's headless architecture, we created a complex B2X product in which the front end is decoupled from the back end, ensuring seamless customer experiences are delivered across multiple channels.

Based on Sitecore OrderCloud, the platform we created for the customer is an extremely flexible e-commerce solution.

The customer was determined to increase revenues from its digital stores by creating omnichannel personalization for relevant and tailored B2C/B2B experiences.

With this in mind, we decided to work on the following areas:

• Delivering memorable online experiences
• Individualizing the journey and marketing activities for each customer
• Driving loyalty and customer engagement
• Reaching full control over digital experience orchestration of commerce journeys
• Implementing smart personalized recommendations

We used Sitecore Discover to provide deeply personalized experiences and customer engagement as well as to deliver individualized, AI-driven search and recommendations in real time.

To allow Discover’s algorithms to generate tailored search results and recommendations, they needed to structure data from XM Cloud and OrderCloud related to the products being sold.

To do this, our team used Brimit’s Experience-Led Commerce Accelerator, which collects all the data about an item from across all Sitecore products used on the platform, transforms it into a compatible feed, and loads it to Sitecore Discover.

For complex B2X solutions like the one for the customer, it’s critical to orchestrate online orders smoothly. We suggest using Brimit’s Order Management Pack for OrderCloud, which includes a complete set of functions and integrations for managing orders, shipping, and returns. The pack is also integrated with 15+ delivery services across the world, including FedEx, DPD, DHL, Aramex, Channels by STC, and ICP.

Our work with the customer involved creating a platform that would not only meet the current market and business needs but also become a future-proof solution that could allow our customer to remain efficient and expand its market presence. 

Our efforts to achieve gains in operational efficiency were guided by the following concepts:

• Less duplication of efforts in content production and marketing
• A centralized view of business and customer profiles
• Decisions based on insights provided by data analytics
• More self-serve options, less pressure, and the cost of call centers

To streamline business processes, the customer needed its data to be complete, organized, and ready for use in data analysis.

We made it possible to collect data from various systems:

Online sales

• OrderCloud: e-commerce data (prices, promotions, taxes, categories, taxonomies, catalogs, orders, items, statuses)
• Payment systems
• Shipping services
• Taxes

Offline sales

• Vending machines

ERP (coming soon)

• Data on cost of production
• Company finances
• Manufacturing (purchasing chemicals and raw materials)
• Information about inventory (remaining stock)
• Real estate data (own, rent, lease)

Valuable reports

• Shipping service performance
• Payment system performance
• Data on the most sold and profitable items by region
• Data on orders
• Daily snapshots

To provide engaging and relevant digital experiences, we connect best-of-breed technologies using smart, cloud-based APIs built on Sitecore's modular DXP platform.

With the freedom of choice that comes through a composable stack, the customer can smoothly adopt emerging technologies to create more individualized, higher-converting shopping experiences.