Building Ecommerce into the fabric of Sterling Home.
Sterling have long been a household name, but their rebrand as Sterling Home aimed to reach new audiences, capitalise on growing ecommerce trends and premiumise their furniture offering. With new, flagship Sterling Home stores rebranding across the country, Sterling wanted to ensure their digital presence was as integrated and future-facing as their new stores.
With UX design, we've built a composable DXP (digital experience platform) to deliver an ecommerce website for Sterling that everyone is hugely proud of, and we thoroughly enjoyed the collaborative process with the Sterling team, who were involved every step of the way.
Visit the new Sterling Home website.
How did we get there? Connecting Sterling’s marketing ecosystem
An important part of our website build was to join the dots between the Sterling Home website and its marketing platforms. This has included integrating the website with Photoslurp, allowing Sterling to connect their online product page with their social media channels. Dog also connected the website to Sterling’s email marketing provider, Omnisend, allowing information on purchase behaviours and abandoned baskets to drive much more effective email marketing. Finally, our work included the set-up of Google Analytics 4 to improve insights into website performance and assist with ecommerce reporting.
Driving product exploration
For Sterling to compete in the ecommerce space, we knew the new website would have to be highly intuitive to customers, ensuring they make the right homewear choices for their homes. With customer experience at the heart of the new website, Klevu's powerful AI technology was used to deliver product category listings and product search, all utilising customer intent data to help improve the conversion rate and revenue. And by integrating the website with Cylindo, we were able to improve the existing product visualisations across colour and material. Website visitors can now view a select number of products in available colours and materials, and quickly find the right product for them through a comprehensive product filter. The website navigation and hierarchy were designed to aid product exploration whilst meeting SEO best practice, with a new ‘Inspire Me’ section for those unsure of where to start.
Building a scalable solution to manage product inventory
It’s not just Sterling’s customers who will see the benefit of the new website. Sterling’s internal teams have updated and improved tools to help them manage product inventory. This is enabling Sterling’s online product catalogue to grow significantly. And we’re moving towards directly integrating with Sterling’s internal retail management platform for faster order processing.
Implementing best of breed technology platforms
Dog is proud to be an Umbraco CMS Gold Partner and Ucommerce Silver Partner. Using these applications as the foundations of Sterling’s website allowed Dog to quickly build the foundations for this digital platform, and offers a great deal of flexibility to customise the content management and ecommerce experiences as well as easily add on new integrations and features.
Where to next?
With Sterling’s commitment to enhancing the in-store experience and bringing it to life online, there’s huge opportunity to further connect the product, marketing mix and in-store experience. With a robust ecommerce offering now live across digital channels and stores, we’re looking forward to supporting them with these exciting further developments.
