The Tile Shop’s roadmap to exponential growth with composable commerce

To elevate the customer experience and drive business growth, The Tile Shop recognized that it had to accomplish three integrated goals:

1. Achieve exponential online conversions by leveraging content management and marketing automation, to nurture and transform prospects into satisfied customers — and ultimately into loyal brand ambassadors.
2. Establish a true omnichannel experience by streamlining all customer interactions across multiple channels, in order to deliver a consistent and personalized customer experience.
3. Connect the online and in-store experiences by integrating all virtual and in-person touchpoints into one cohesive buying journey — which is the key to satisfying customers, reducing churn, and elevating brand recognition and reputation. The Tile Shop wanted to make its renowned in-store experience come to life online.

An ambitious vision invariably faces significant challenges, and The Tile Shop’s journey to exponential growth with composable commerce was not an exception. The company identified three key challenges that had to be addressed and overcome:

1. Over dependence on ERP monolith. Today, ecommerce must be able to live anywhere —across every online and offline channel — enabling companies to embrace new business models and capitalize on go-to-market strategies as they emerge.
2. Slow engineering velocity. It has never been more critical for companies to have the right systems and solutions to take great ideas, and rapidly get them into their customers’ hands.
3. Marketing’s dependence on IT. This led to disconnects and silos, which was undermining performance, productivity, results, and the need to deliver a unified, cohesive customer experience across channels.

The Tile Shop, together with its consulting and implementation partner Netlify, addressed each challenge head-on using the following strategy:

1. Dismantling the monolith

This involved introducing a completely new organizing structure, culminating in a platform evaluation checklist that embraced four elements:

• Dimension (category of functionality or business concern).
• Experience (expected user experience for one or more capabilities).
• Capability (a specific functional ability or grouping of features).
• Feature (a specific task that the user can perform with the solution).

Using this framework, The Tile Shop realized that composable was the right solution, because it is both loosely coupled and best-of-breed. The company evaluated many vendors, each with its own (and very different) cost model. When they approached Sitecore, their core requirements were clear:

• They wanted a partner with vision who could take them into the future.
• The ROI had to be justifiable, with customer experience driving three levers: traffic, conversion, and average order value (AOV).

2. Integrated a composable stack

The Tile Shop’s new composable stack is built on three Sitecore solutions — XM Cloud, OrderCloud, and Discover —integrating content to commerce operations and experience management, and is rooted in advanced AI. This architecture has enabled The Tile Shop to take control of its content lifecycle from strategy to delivery by bringing together content management, digital asset management, limitless commerce, and intelligent search. Advanced personalization and testing functionality will be added soon.

With respect to implementation, the company applied what is known as the “strangler” pattern. This is when a legacy system is placed behind intermediary façade, which represents functional entry points to the system. Over time, replacement services for the old system are added behind the facade.

3. Unified the experience

Previously, The Tile Shop’s online UI was broken down into two components: one powered by Sitecore XP, and one powered by SAP. This invariably produced a divergence in some customer-facing elements. Depending on how and where they were interacting with the online store — for example, logging into their online account — some customers saw and experienced one thing, while other customers saw and experienced something else. And in some cases, the same customer had a different experience despite performing the same action.

To solve this challenge, The Tile Shop decoupled the head of its tech stack (as discussed previously) and introduced a middleware that abstracts and integrates through the microservices layer, instead of having to go point-to-point. This major upgrade has established a single UI that aligns with prevailing brand standards (e.g., fonts, colors, messaging, button size, etc.), and delivers the unified experience that today’s customers increasingly expect and demand.

Just five months after setting off on its journey to exponential growth with composable commerce, The Tile Shop is realizing significant improvements — including some results that have exceeded the company’s expectations. These include:

The Tile Shop is also seeing significant gains in its online store experience. These include:

Discover more about how composable commerce can benefit your business.