The retail industry continues to adapt to changing customer expectations and connecting to the modern customer through digital channels. Today, 79% of Americans shop online and expect a compelling customer experience across channels. In fact, customers that have personalized online shopping journeys spend 140% more than their counterparts.
With the evolving needs of a customer, a robust and flexible eCommerce strategy is critical, as most customers view websites as an extension of every store’s brand. One study found that digital interactions can influence 56 cents of every dollar that is spent in retail stores. And with the advent of new digital purchasing channels, comes the era of unified eCommerce.
This is why ASICS, a global athletic footwear, and apparel company, is on a mission to build a global eCommerce strategy by improving the customer experience across all ASICS brands and digital channels, and, in turn, generating higher revenue.
For ASICS Global Digital, the division charged with digital innovation across the company, connecting customers to the right products on the right channel and at the right time is essential to providing customers with the future of retail: a connected, personalized shopping experience.
What does this next generation, eCommerce experience look like? Well, no matter if a shopper is looking for a product on ASICS, Tiger, Haglöfs, Runkeeper or any other ASICS brand, the customer can receive personalized product recommendations, real-time inventory data for nearby locations and customized offers.
Deploying new eCommerce capabilities with Anypoint Platform 2.5x faster
To build this personalized strategy, ASICS needed to unify and modernize nearly a dozen systems across all geographies and digital channels in order to create a single view of their customer. This required migrating to a new, modern eCommerce platform, built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The challenge was that ASICS’ IT team needed to tie in backend system data from a number of ASICS brands – from Tiger to Runkeeper – into Salesforce.
“Our primary goal at ASICS is to transform the way that we connect with consumers by creating innovative digital solutions,” said Dan Smith, Senior General Manager at ASICS. “In many cases, our first step is implementing technology like MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to help organize the complex network of ASICS eCommerce sites and build direct-to-consumer communications.”
To begin, ASICS used MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to expose data from Order Management Systems (OMS), payment providers, email service providers, and legacy systems through APIs––promoting governed access to customer information, order status, real-time inventory, and pricing.
The ASICS team continues to develop RAML files and set up property files for different environments. The first project, estimated to take 2.5 months, was completed in just 4 weeks––allowing the team to focus more on innovative projects. Using MuleSoft, ASICS was able to complete a series of projects and build a global eCommerce platform in less than 6 months.
Adopting an API-led approach to foster digital transformation
ASICS aims to continue building more personalized relationships with customers by leveraging Anypoint Platform to roll out Salesforce Commerce Cloud across Tiger, Haglöfs, Runkeeper, and other ASICS brands.
To do this, ASICS will continue to expose existing IT assets using APIs––creating an infrastructure of APIs, often described as an application network, where data, applications, and systems can be created and reused to rapidly build new applications and experiences for customers.
This means that Tiger, Haglöf, and Runkeepers’ transition to Salesforce Commerce Cloud will be delivered more quickly using the reusable components created with this API-led approach.
For example, the “ASICS Order Management API,” was created in the first project to access relevant data about orders and changes in product inventory. The ASICS IT team reused the same API to connect to Haglöf’s order management system as well. The same reuse concept applies to other APIs (e.g. ASICS Email API) that will have company- or department-wide use cases.
Overall, with MuleSoft, ASICS’ development teams not only completed projects 2.5x faster, but also delivered a more personalized experience to customers.
“What developers like the most about using MuleSoft is that it allows us to spend all of our time in the application specific logic and not have to worry about making those connections to the various data sources,” says Phil Connaughton, Director of Engineering at ASICS Global Digital.
“By leveraging MuleSoft, we have saved months of development time and enabled our system to be highly versatile,” says Connaughton. “With the agility provided by Anypoint Platform, we expect to complete our eCommerce platform migration in roughly half the time we had projected, allowing our customers to get access to new features, such as enhanced promotions, even more quickly.”
Learn more about how MuleSoft is helping leading retailers like ASICS tackle digital transformation at NRF’s Big Show in NYC on January 14-16. We will be on Level 1 at Booth #1073, showcasing product demos and giving away great swag. Visit our NRF event site for more information and to schedule a time with the MuleSoft team.
