5 Examples of Digital Transformation in Ecommerce

Ecommerce digital transformation is essential for brands — not optional. Shoppers have almost endless options on the digital shelf, and brands that aren’t equipped to keep up with the continually shifting buying journey will fall behind.

These examples of digital transformation from some of the leading product and retail brands highlight the urgent need for technology, solutions, and processes that support the new buyer journey and the rise of the digital shelf.

1. Califia Farms Builds DTC Shopping Experiences To Drive Engagement and Sales

The direct-to-consumer (DTC) model offers product brands deeper insight into their customer behavior — which can then be leveraged to create personalized experiences — and faster speed to market. An increasing number of legacy brands, well-known and established brands with decades of sales history, are embracing the DTC model and finding success selling directly to customers.

Califia Farms, a U.S. plant-based beverage brand, wanted its DTC website to provide more than just branded content. Its team partnered with Salsify to overhaul how shoppers discovered, researched, and purchased their products online.

They started by creating a central source of truth for product content to streamline their go-to-market process and then leveraged first-party data to create improved shopping experiences.

In addition to improved speed to market across its team, its insights-driven optimization resulted in a 400% DTC sales increase for the product brand.

The Califia Farms website features a broad assortment of engaging content — from helpful recipes and product reviews to detailed breakdowns of all its product offerings and a product locator tool.

Image Source: Califia Farms

2. Energizer Scales Its Ecommerce Presence To Adapt to the Modern Customer Journey

One word to describe the current customer journey? Messy.

Buying batteries used to involve heading to your local hardware store, picking up one of the two or three options available, and paying at the register. Now, even something as (seemingly) simple as buying batteries can involve numerous steps.

From researching battery performance across brands and reading customer reviews — to perusing a new article about sustainable and rechargeable battery options — shoppers spend most of their time in what Think with Google calls the “messy middle.”

Global product brand Energizer understands that modern shoppers must be met where they are, which meant expanding the number of digital touch points where consumers could connect with the brand. Working with Salsify, the Energizer team identified its highest-priority retail channels and leveraged product content syndication to expand its online presence.

Energizer now syndicates product content to 30 different retail channels and stores for more than 25,000 product records with Salsify. These connections and central source of truth allow the Energizer team to meet its customers wherever they are on the digital shelf.

3. Carrefour and SEB Launch an Ecommerce Upgrade To Meet Black Friday Demands

While Black Friday may have started in the U.S. as an after-Thanksgiving shopping holiday, retailers, brands, and (unsurprisingly) shoppers worldwide have embraced it as an important shopping holiday. This increased demand for deals means global product and retail brands must be equipped to take advantage of this shift in the market.

Multinational retail brand Carrefour understood this urgent need to adapt and worked with Salsify to transform its ecommerce website to upgrade its simple click-and-collect grocery model to highlight its non-perishable goods — specifically its small appliance and cookware brand, Groupe SEB. Its team started by streamlining its processes to collect, manage, and update product content, which allowed them to build customer-centric product pages.

Carrefour and SEB teams are now equipped to handle Black Friday and every other shopping day of the year with enriched content experiences. Creating new product pages used to take the teams several days, but the process can now be completed in minutes — giving them more time to build customer-centric retail shopping experiences.

Image Source: Carrefour and SEB

4. The Kraft Heinz Company Prioritizes the Digital Shelf To Deliver Quality Product Content Worldwide

While global product and retail brands have many advantages — like almost-universal brand awareness and exceptional brand loyalty — the sheer scale and size of these organizations mean they also have a unique set of challenges.

The most prominent? Managing some of the most complex supply chains in the industry.

The Kraft Heinz Company has more than 3,000 global SKUs across thousands of retail locations and hundreds of ecommerce partners. Its digital shelf team was therefore tasked with building an efficient system of record to ensure teams across the product content lifecycle could work together to create engaging shopping experiences.

With Salsify, The Kraft Heinz Company is now equipped to update retailer product content in minutes — not days — allowing its team to spend time managing product content optimization to boost product discovery and ensure that the product brand can keep up with the changing world of commerce.

Image Source: The Kraft Heinz Company

5. Petco Delivers Optimized Product Content To Boost Conversion

Enhanced content, also called rich media or A+ content, offers shoppers more than a simple product image and bullet points. From comparison charts and helpful graphics to editorial imagery and video, product pages that leverage enhanced content see higher conversion than non-rich media pages.

Petco, a major U.S. pet health and wellness retailer, understands the importance of delivering helpful, informative, and engaging product content for its shoppers. While the brand may have started as a mail-order company in the 1970s, it has continually evolved to keep up with every generation of shoppers. For Petco, this means scaling the use of enhanced content on its website.

With Salsify, the Petco ecommerce team was able to bring enhanced content to every vendor, including its own private-label brands. Petco now has more than 2,500 SKUs with enhanced content and has seen quarter-over-quarter growth.

Future-Proof Your Product or Retail Brand

By embracing digital transformation, these product and retail brands are equipped to meet the continually evolving demands of modern commerce. These examples of digital transformation highlight the pressing need for technology, solutions, and processes that embrace change and allow ecommerce teams to move quickly and adapt.

Organizations that stay on the sidelines — and don’t join the journey to digital transformation in ecommerce — risk losing out to the competition.