When brands consider leveraging SFRA, they typically look for fast time to market, ease of use, and lower cost associated with ongoing administration, and ultimately driving business results. SFRA delivers—it is a reliable and stable reference architecture used by many of the leading global brands. It’s the go-to when you need a proven, secure, scalable, and reliable solution.
Earlier in this series, we discussed reasons to upgrade to SFRA, tips for doing so, and pitfalls to avoid. Now it’s time to talk about the most important aspect of an SFRA upgrade: the results. We are happy to discuss just two of our many SFRA customer case studies that demonstrate how global brands leveraged SFRA to achieve a high return on investment (ROI) and realize business value.
El Palacio de Hierro
El Palacio de Hierro is an upscale retail brand with multiple department stores in Mexico. The flagship store, based in Polanco, Mexico City, is the largest department store in Latin America. El Palacio operated with a traditional retail model, which focuses on driving most business through brick-and-mortar stores, relying on highly personalized one-on-one interactions between customers and personal shoppers.
As El Palacio started growing with the younger generation of consumers, the focus was put on ecommerce. The brand thus turned to Astound to help with the evaluation process. El Palacio was on Magento at the time and needed to understand which architecture would provide the least amount of disruption to business—one that would allow for integration with SAP ERP, custom retail store management systems, and private label payment methods and loyalty cards while having the most advanced ecommerce and omnichannel capabilities.
Together, we partnered with Salesforce and determined that SFRA, along with Marketing Cloud and MuleSoft, was the best way to move forward.
El Palacio was also undergoing an order management system (OMS) reimplementation in parallel with Fluent OMS, involving more than 200,000 products and dozens of stores. The brand also needed an expansive customer-centric user experience (UX) redesign and content enablement using Page Designer. Launched in 2020, with a subsequent loyalty microsite launched in 2021, the decision to go with SFRA proved to be very successful. It also enabled El Palacio to scale seamlessly on demand to handle a drastic increase in order volumes during the pandemic and enable changes in business processes, rapid introduction of buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), and other critical capabilities driven by the rapidly evolving consumer needs.
The results for El Palacio speak for themselves:
303%
OVERALL ECOMMERCE REVENUE INCREASED
374%
INCREASE IN REVENUE FROM MOBILE DEVICES
57%
OVERALL CONVERSION RATE IMPROVED
107%
DESKTOP DEVICES’ CONVERSION RATE IMPROVED
PUMA
PUMA and Astound have been partners for years in the digital space, with Astound designing and building its flagship websites on the Commerce Cloud platform. Together, we decided to embark on an exciting journey—to be the pilot customer to launch on Salesforce’s newly developed reference architecture, SFRA, even while the application was still in beta back in 2018. “Forever Faster” indeed.
PUMA was interested in both a front-end redesign, with a hyper-focus on mobile, as well as a technological uplift, utilizing server-side JavaScript and the latest frameworks over legacy Salesforce tools. The scope was ambitious: over 20 European countries at launch and a migration of its German digital flagship website.
Since that launch, PUMA expanded this architecture into North America, Latin America, and Asia, showing the scalability of the architecture and Commerce Cloud. Recently, the company has migrated to headless commerce for certain markets—still powered by Salesforce. This is a great pattern for many customers outgrowing their current platform or architecture—you can implement quickly on SFRA, then move to a composable storefront as your digital ecosystem matures.
2X
PRE-TAX EARNINGS INCREASE
69%
FASTER SITE LOAD SPEED
50%
INCREASE MOBILE CONVERSION
When you need a proven, stable platform, Salesforce delivers. When you need a reference store that delivers results, SFRA is a great choice. We’re excited to unveil our reference store that levels up the gains SFRA has given customers for years in the final part in our series.
Need help implementing SFRA on Salesforce Commerce Cloud? We’re here for you; please get in touch.
Headed to Dreamforce and want to speak with us in person? Visit us at booth #1729.