Moxie Group

Their challenge

When Moxie Group was approached by their client to build the eCommerce store for their new outdoors business, they were told they wanted to do something different, with a different plan and a different way to get to market and serve their customers. They not only wanted to excel in customer service but also in the way they represent their products, the product research and testing that goes into every item in their catalog and the finer details behind each product to really help customers shop by finding the best product for their needs as easily as possible.

They knew they didn’t want to use a traditional eCommerce platform and just ‘get a store online’. They wanted to do something that would let them manifest different ideas in a custom way.

With such a new and unique vision for a company in this industry, they needed to find a technology that fit their customizable bill.

Some of the most important items that Moxie Group had to consider through the tool they chose were:

• The ability to support a lot of custom rules due to the client selling many restricted products that can only ship to certain places.
• The client request for finding a solution that would allow them to select “best-of-breed” components for the different aspects of their business systems.
• Being able to handle complex integrations with many third-party tools.
• The ability to handle high volumes of traffic.
• The need to get a viable solution into the marketplace as efficiently as possible and then begin iterating to expand the solution in different directions.

The approach

After considering the more traditional eCommerce platforms that were all ruled out early due to inability to support the depth and breadth of the product catalog and complex business requirements and restrictions, they decided that rather than settle for one monolithic platform where they would have to settle for ‘ok’ features, they would go for a best-of-breed approach.

The client’s Director of Digital and Technology understood that no one company can be the best at everything and so wanted to pick world-class tools for each component they required and bring them altogether. They knew building their own orchestration layer would be costly and timely and so needed to find a solution that would potentially provide that layer for them as they had a tight go-to-market deadline.  And that’s when they discovered Moltin.

Moltin (used for the product, cart and checkout functionality) also became the “glue” between each of their chosen tools (including GroupBy for search, Contentful for content management and Salsify for product experience) and orchestrated them to work in sync while still allowing each tool to be used natively.

The results

• The development timeline: this project went from first contact to live within 15 weeks (5 development sprints). The client started out with nothing - the business was new, they had no technologies in place, no database. They had to get from nothing to something as quickly as possible and with the help of Moltin and other partners, they added the pieces in layers and were ready for QA and testing within 12 weeks. To get the end result within July to launch in November was a massive accomplishment that everyone is proud of.
• Custom logic:  the store initially has over 30,000 SKUs in the system all with custom requirements and restrictions, with many more being added each month. Moltin is able to handle this easily with Flows (custom data API).
• Store performance: When you place an order into the website, it automatically flows from the website to Moltin, to the order management systems, then to warehouse, to fulfillment - allowing them to ship an order within 15 minutes of it being placed.
• Ready for the future: the client site is still at MVP. There is a lot more they want to do with their product catalog, including changing how products are represented and searched for. They are also planning on adding in more advanced user account capabilities, promotions and a bunch of other integrations, all utilizing the Moltin solution.