When Tekla, a textile brand based in Copenhagen, Denmark, decided to move to a headless commerce model, they experienced an immediate increase in their conversion rate. In this case study, we’ll look at what challenges Tekla faced when using WooCommerce as their ecommerce platform and how switching to a headless commerce model solved these problems. We’ll also explore the benefits of headless commerce and discuss the outcomes of Tekla’s decision to make the switch.
Benefits of headless commerce for Tekla:
- Improved e-commerce conversion rates
- Increased speed and flexibility
- Improved customization and integration options
- Easier management of multiple regions and currencies from a single platform.
Challenges with WooCommerce
If you run an online business using WooCommerce, you may face challenges similar to those faced by Tekla. A slow store can negatively impact the user experience and your brand. The monolithic nature of WordPress and WooCommerce can make it hard to customize the storefront and user experience. This limits your ability to integrate new business apps and add new features to the user experience. Lastly, WooCommerce presents challenges when adding and managing multiple regions and currencies from a single platform.
A slow online store can negatively impact the user experience in a few ways. First, it can make the site difficult to navigate and use. This can lead to frustrated customers who may abandon their purchase altogether. Second, a slow site can also affect your search engine ranking. Google penalizes sites that load slowly, which means you could be losing out on potential customers who are searching for your products online. Lastly, a slow site can give the impression that your business is outdated or not well-maintained, which can turn potential customers away.
One of the key benefits of headless commerce is that it decouples the frontend from the backend. This means that you can build a custom frontend using any technology you want, without being limited by the capabilities of your eCommerce platform. For example, you could use React or Vue.js to build a fast, responsive frontend with an amazing user experience. You could also use headless commerce to easily add new features to your frontend, without having to rebuild the entire site. And because the frontend is decoupled from the backend, you can easily make changes to your backend without affecting the frontend. This makes headless commerce much more flexible and scalable than traditional eCommerce platforms.
The Solution: Headless Commerce
After researching different solutions, it became clear that no single platform could cater to their requirements in a way that would be easily maintainable.
Tekla chose a headless architecture to have more control over the user experience. This way they could ensure their website’s front-end matched their brand identity. Headless commerce separates the back-end (where you manage content) from the front-end (what customers see on your site). So, WordPress would only be responsible for content management, while a separate front-end would be built to display that content. This gives businesses more control over how their website looks and functions.
The Result
A typical implementation of a new ecommerce solution takes around 4-8 months. The headless commerce solution for Tekla was implemented in a month – significantly faster, cheaper and with fewer issues than would have been experienced with re-platforming.
In addition to the colossal 70% increase in conversion rate that Tekla experienced after going live with the new headless commerce solution, they were also able to make use of multi-regional commerce, adding 50 new markets and six currencies to their online presence with a single backend to manage inventory and order fulfilment.
The store was also much faster, enabling customers to explore the full Tekla product range seamlessly. They were also able to automate their return, exchange, and claim processes fully.
