Home Outlet Builds a Seamless Shopping Experience with BigCommerce

SOLUTION

Improving the experience for shoppers and the team with customizations.

A key reason Home Outlet migrated from Drupal was to create a world-class shopping experience for online customers. As part of this, Home Outlet needed the BOPIS and “shopping by store” features rebuilt to provide a top-notch user journey.

Mira Commerce understood the task at hand and created a custom feature that easily allows users to choose the location where they’d like to pick up their online order.

“This feature was 100% customized. We fetch the location list using GraphQL and it’s saved in the user session. That specifies a location that the inventory has to be deducted from. The location also fetches live stock directly from Home Outlet’s ERP prior to processing a customer’s checkout. Metafields are also used for keeping custom prices per location,” explained Crystal Stevens, Client Success Manager at Mira Commerce.

On top of this, Mira Commerce went the extra mile and created a custom checkout process with Signifyd that triggers potential fraudulent transactions to shoppers, online store managers, and in-store personnel. This allows orders to be put on hold for manual review before being picked up in-store — minimizing back-end tasks regarding checking for fraudulent orders and improving the BOPIS connectivity.

Since re-launching the store with Mira Commerce’s BOPIS feature, Home Outlet customers can effortlessly select the store location they want to pick up their order from without experiencing glitches or difficulties.

“This feature has created a seamless experience that lets shoppers place the order online and when they pick it up in-store, they have curbside service. They pull up, our partners are ready to load things for them, and it gives us a chance to demonstrate the customer service we're known for,” explained Russell.

Additionally, Mira Commerce created a manual cart customization that allows Home Outlet’s customer service associates to create an online shopping cart on behalf of the shopper and then send it to them for review and an easy checkout experience.

“Mira Commerce created this feature so that if a customer wants a whole kitchen, the Home Outlet partner can build the entire cart of all of the different items that the customer needs, put them in what we call a manual cart, send that link over to the customer, and all the customer has to do is enter their credit card information and pay,” explained Russell.

Scaling the business through a user-friendly interface.

Due to BigCommerce’s user-friendly interface, Home Outlet has improved its ability to promote its online store.

“With the old platform, we had internal challenges as far as collaboration. As marketers, we didn't really have the knowledge that we needed to use the platform very extensively. That was definitely an issue because we needed the help of our Ecommerce Team and developers to do things that should have been pretty simple,” explained Danial Reed, VP of Marketing at Home Outlet.

Since launching on BigCommerce, Home Outlet’s Marketing Team has used the platform’s many tools to promote the site and help generate online business.

“We've kind of let the Marketing Team go, which has been great because they're great at what they do. We don't want to be a stopgap for them, and BigCommerce lets us get them set up and let them go. This week, we're running our first online-only promo, which was all geared up by the Marketing Team,” said Reed.

In addition to running online promotions, Home Outlet has grown its marketing efforts by incorporating blog content that educates consumers. Customers are shown relevant content based on their product searches, which helps inform them on whether a product is the right choice — generating sales and minimizing returns.

On top of this, the re-platformed site fully embodies the company’s branding in a sleek and modern way, providing an aesthetically pleasing shopping experience unique to Home Outlet. With BigCommerce’s design capabilities, the company effortlessly incorporated promotional features throughout the site, such as the customer sign-up button. Implementing this functionality has helped collect more customer data for marketing initiatives designed to grow the business.

Automating tasks with integrations and apps to maximize team efficiency.

A significant issue Home Outlet faced on its old platform was connecting to its ERP, Bistrack Epicor. With the help of Mira Commerce, the company successfully integrated it into BigCommerce.

“We used Jitterbit for the integration, and the criteria for selecting Jitterbit was having both the BisTrack connector and the BigCommerce connector. All the flows are done through that, starting from products and finishing with the orders and order statuses,” explained Stevens.

With the successful integration of Home Outlet’s ERP, team efficiency has drastically improved since it automatically communicates data with the different features incorporated throughout the site.

“Mira Commerce was instrumental in connecting our ERP system and making sure that everything talks and communicates,” remarked Russell.

The company also integrates several third-party apps designed to further enhance the customer experience and alleviate back-office tasks. A few of Home Outlet’s favorites include Algolia — which creates an intuitive search experience for shoppers — and Avalara — which manages taxes. 

“We use Avalara when it comes to taxes and tax codes. The app was easy to integrate and we had the freedom to make tweaks to it in order to make it right for our business,” explained Russell.