A decision to restructure
The Tile Shop website features a seamless user experience, offering personalization and streamlined services to customers shopping for home flooring. But this wasn’t always the case. Before The Tile Shop sought to revamp their digital presence, the company faced some architectural challenges. Outdated infrastructure reduced scalability, speed, and personalization, and didn’t support valuable modern content management tools and integrations.
While the legacy ERP monolith slowed engineering and innovation velocity, it also hindered the marketing teams’ ability to self service. Because commerce and content were so separate, customers were served a fragmented user experience across e-commerce, content systems, and physical storefronts. Response times to changing trends and customer needs were slow – and The Tile Shop knew that without a unified, aligned customer experience, their situation would only worsen.
Without our products and our customers at the center, everything else just kind of gets lost. We needed to focus on aligning everything around them.
A restructuring wouldn’t just create better UX, it would also foster executive alignment on a composable commerce approach – and scale product assortment and customer segments faster. So, along with its implementation partners, The Tile Shop got to work.
Replacing the legacy system
By adopting a software architecture approach known as a “strangler pattern,” The Tile Shop was able to incrementally decouple from its legacy infrastructure. As they gradually broke down the monolith into modular services, the client successfully migrated to composable architecture using Netlify’s edge hosting and Sitecore’s headless CMS and commerce suite. While Netlify offered edge-first performance, static hosting, and rapid deployment workflows, digital marketing agency Altudo helped provide integration strategy and execution.
Edge CDN and static-first hosting allowed the Tile team to deploy faster and serve performance-improved content — a crucial feature for e-commerce conversions and mobile users. The Tile Shop was soon equipped with a modular stack that enabled them to plug and play services (CMS, search, DAM, payments) without rearchitecting the entire system.
Realizing core successes
The strengths of the new infrastructure were immediately apparent – including unified content, commerce, and search for customers, replacing the previously disjointed experience. With modern content management tools and technology stacks now at their disposal, internal teams were empowered with faster deployment and a lower total cost of ownership. The Tile Shop also saw:
- 10x performance improvement with Netlify’s edge CDN
- 20%+ expected increase in conversion rates
- 25%+ increase in average order value
- Ability to launch new digital experiences 50% faster and cheaper
- Improved team velocity and alignment across business units
Planning for the future
With its composable commerce in place, The Tile Shop has plans to increase B2B efforts and commercial customer segments, including new product categories and omni-channel cart continuity. The team is also exploring integration of AI-enabled workflows for agent-style customer service experiences, content ops, and personalization. At the end of the day, The Tile Shop’s forward-looking plans have one main goal – keep creating dynamic, seamless experiences for customers.
In a word of advice to fellow decision makers, CIO Christopher Davis urged businesses to be clear on customer needs and business objectives — otherwise, “you just got an expensive new system.” He encourages leaders to prioritize customers’ needs, saying that he and his team “laid out the customer at the center, then our products, then our capabilities…and only after that, the systems.”
Interested in seeing how the composable web can set your business free? Get in touch with our team.