From IBM WebSphere to Salesforce Success

One of the most respected brands in its industry, Homemakers Furniture has made a name for itself by providing quality service, furniture, mattresses, and home décor to the residents of Iowa since its founding in 1974. Now shipping nationwide, the beloved Midwestern brand has grown to command a 215,000-square-foot retail space, two individual warehouses connected by a skywalk conveyor system, and has become Urbandale’s eighth-largest employer.

Fueled by its fundamental desire to provide shoppers with the best possible brand experience, Homemakers engaged Astound to develop its debut ecommerce platform, launched on IBM WebSphere in 2014.

Although Homemakers’ inaugural platform had served it well, several aspects of the technology build began to hinder Homemakers’ ability to fulfill its strategic objectives as it sought to expand its omnichannel offerings.

In particular, deep customizations made integrating the site with back-end systems challenging, thus causing delays in order management, inventory, and pricing updates. Likewise, the site lacked the flexibility to incorporate new functionality, features, and content without the help of a developer. Inefficiencies in order processing created a disparity between Homemakers’ in-store and digital experiences, and the site was not mobile-friendly—a minimum requirement for omnichannel success.

Homemakers, ready for a change, selected Salesforce Commerce Cloud for the migration, entrusting its long-time partner to continue guiding its digital transformation.

Our digital strategists and ecommerce experts collaborated with Homemakers’ stakeholders to develop a new digital roadmap for the brand. The goal? To create a streamlined, intuitive omnichannel shopping experience that would increase online sales, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and enable a dynamic, scalable digital foundation to support connected commerce.

We worked with Homemakers during the migration process, leveraging our extensive Salesforce expertise to overcome challenges related to product data migration, rich content creation, and order management integration to create a unified digital ecosystem.

In addition to the replatform, we wove in several key integrations, streamlined order processing through real-time inventory and pricing updates, and enabled automatic customer communications and order tracking for a superior brand experience, pre- through post-purchase. Implementing Page Designer, which utilizes a drag-and-drop interface, allows Homemakers to rapidly design, preview, schedule, and publish custom, engaging, rich content pages for enhanced usability. This internal process improvement provides more time for business users to focus on pressing operational needs while significantly improving the shopping experience— dramatically increasing page views, average order volume, and revenue. Additionally, we implemented Elavon Fusebox payment gateway, providing secure, flexible, reliable transactions.

We successfully migrated Homemakers’ legacy IBM WebSphere platform to Commerce Cloud on time, on budget, and without any business interruption. Just over six months post-launch, the new functionalities Homemakers offers its customers have quickly impacted key loyalty drivers, improving online sales, customer satisfaction, and brand engagement.