Summit Group Personalizes B2B2C Ecommerce on Znode
Situation
Summit Group drives growth and results through recognition & incentive programs, creative marketing services, and branded merchandise solutions. The company's vision is to build stronger brands for customers by educating them on best practices, solutions, and products to build loyal, engaged communities.
Challenge
Summit Group provides memorable branded merchandise and creates storefronts for business customers, selling products through digital pop-up shops and customer-branded storefronts. Summit Group depended upon a legacy ecommerce system that required the company to build each customer-specific storefront from the ground up. Developing personalized content, applying different payment methods, and providing unique product assortments (catalogs). for each storefront required considerable effort from the internal technical team.
Summit Group required an ecommerce platform with a content management system (CMS) for creating and managing a variety of content widgets and templates without needing to rebuild each content element when launching each unique storefront. Additionally, Summit Group required different payment methods (credit, purchase orders, gift cards) and quote request options at a storefront level to match customer preferences.
To deliver personalized shopping experiences, Summit Group needed to set up nearly 20 different configurations for storefronts. Configurable options included product comparison requests, “email a friend” product referral, stock notice sign-up, promotional codes, and backorder inventory information.
The goal of these storefront configurations was to align with the company's mission of building stronger brands for customers. However, this required the technical team to build each storefront and feature uniquely while managing the storefronts on separate databases, which added costs and slowed speed-to-market.
Solution
Summit Group chose Znode to quickly launch multiple customer storefronts and support its B2B2C business model. Administrators can now create unique storefronts personalized to customer-specific requirements. Time and effort from the technical team were significantly reduced as storefront configuration options are applied globally in Znode rather than built fresh for each storefront.
Using Znode’s CMS, Summit Group created numerous unique homepage templates to display different widgets such as banners to meet buyers’ specific requirements. Summit Group administrators set up attributes for each storefront based on customer requirements to personalize the user experience. Znode’s attribution engine enabled Summit Group’s development team to build additional storefront attributes without the need for the database to be touched by an outside developer. A parent theme was created that housed all possible storefront features needed by a customer, all of which could be enabled or disabled for a particular storefront. Znode gave Summit Group administrators the ability to launch new storefronts without having to write custom code or separately manage hundreds of unique storefront experiences.
Summit Group optimized its business operations and increased speed-to-market by leveraging Znode’s native multi-store configuration capabilities.
"Znode gave us the ecommerce management configuration we needed to simplify our ecommerce operations and deliver on our brand promise."
- Scott Smith, Group President Branded Solutions at Summit Group