Blending storytelling and commerce with best-in-class tech to create meaningful engagement.
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Big Green Egg® embarked on a full site redesign and replatform to evolve it from an acquisition-only store into an engaging customer destination bursting with content. They designed their ecommerce experience to go beyond simply selling products by educating and providing real value to their alfresco aficionados.
With the replatforming from Magento 1.0 to a headless Commerce Layer solution, the mouthwatering blend of commerce, content, and cooking delivered exceptional results:
- 60% increase in revenue since relaunch
- 71% increase in AOV
- 23% increase in conversion rate
- 35% reduction in checkout abandonment
Big Green Egg (BGE) is the ultimate outdoor charcoal cooking vessel, valued for its versatility and culinary results, and known for its cult following. First developed over forty years ago, the EGG® has evolved into a highly modernized version of an ancient Japanese cooker originally known as a kamado. Its unique ceramic design is perfect for a wide range of cooking styles — grilling, roasting, smoking, baking, and even slow cooking. Its durability is demonstrated by its lifetime guarantee and its community of enthusiasts who share recipes and tips to get the most from their beloved EGG. This presented BGE an opportunity to tap into existing advantages and create online engagement through compelling content.
Creating experiences that support customers at all stages of their ownership
ALFRESCO CONCEPTS (UK) LIMITED is a UK-based retail company that is the sole licensed partner of Big Green Egg in the UK and Ireland. They engaged Rotate°, a leading ecommerce agency and early advocate of composable commerce, to redesign the customer experience and modernize its tech stack.
The original BGE site was geared towards new customer acquisition. Yet, it did not provide appropriate product education for users to convert into customers. This presented a couple of significant opportunities for the redesign.
- Improving the purchase process for new customers
BGE’s customer service team was inundated with questions during the ordering process; purchasing luxury products is a highly considered decision. In the case of BGE, it requires some know-how; from selecting the right EGG for you, a base for it to fit within, suitable accessories and finally navigating a plethora of fuel options. - Building a long-lasting relationship with customers
BGE has always been dedicated to great customer service as evidenced by its lifetime warranty. Still, the online experience did not fully take advantage of what made the brand unique: a long-lasting product that cultivated a lifelong community of "Eggheads".
Magento 1.0 was used as a monolith (ecommerce, customers, POS, order management, CMS) for both B2C and B2B purposes. The Rotate° team sought to build a foundational ecommerce architecture that would enable rich storytelling and also support commercial growth. All through an integrated shopping experience.
Improving the purchase process for new customers
Rotate° has been an early adopter of the composable approach. This gives the Rotate° team the ability to work unshackled; with no compromises with the implementation. For the client, this brings best-in-class services and unrivaled performance.
The resulting tech-stack
- Commerce Engine — Commerce Layer
- CMS — DatoCMS
- Search — Algolia
- SSG/framework — Nuxt.js
- CDN — Edgio, Cloudflare
Rotate° set out to create content and shopping experiences for BGE that supported both new and returning customers. They created different shopping funnels, those that catered to new customers discovering BGE for the first time and those designed for existing EGG owners. All this was made shoppable using Commerce Layer as the core commerce API.
To guide new customers along the purchase process, Rotate° created a "Build an EGG" interactive video-led purchase flow. It introduces customers to the brand, educates them on the EGG’s versatility and creates a purchase opportunity at each step. This increased AOV by 71% and reduced returns and customer complaints.
Content-led commerce
Storytelling plays an important role in engaging customers after their purchase to show how they can best care for the EGG and fully leverage its versatility. Video and rich imagery were ideal mediums for this aspirational culinary experience. Delivering an experience you can almost taste.
Rotate° chose DatoCMS, a headless CMS to power content such as recipes, chef’s stories, how-to guides, even an events calendar to bring EGGheads together, and draw customers back to the site.
This flexible CMS allowed content curators to build engaging pages and at the same time, optimize them for revenue by associating related products for purchase. The "How To Set Up for Pizzas" page perfectly demonstrates this contextual blending of content and commerce. The page includes a how-to video, baking tips and pizza recipes, plus related accessories for purchase such as the baking stone and convEGGtor. The content curation and the product data structures are set up in DatoCMS. Commerce Layer provides the price and stock level for each product SKU as well as full transaction functionality to make it shoppable.
This approach reaped compelling results. Customers viewing recipes and guides had on average, a 26% higher AOV than a general site-wide purchaser. Those who browsed a recipe and added to cart in the same session were 170% more likely to convert than a general site-wide visitor.
With a benefit-led approach to our site redesign from Rotate°, combined with the technical platform migration away from Magento to Commerce Layer, the first year was a great success.
Flexibility and Extensibility
BGE required an integration with a complex 3PL to manage varied shipping options at checkout, including white glove services. Due to the vastly different sizes of their SKUs, smaller items could be delivered through couriers, while bulkier items like the EGG, required in-person delivery. These requirements were readily configured using Commerce Layer’s flexible shipping categories and shipping methods resources.
Further demonstrating the extensibility of composable commerce, Rotate° built a Dispatch and Delivery Date API on top of Commerce Layer’s APIs that allows customers to select a preferred delivery date at checkout. It factored weekends and holidays, pallet capacity and stock already committed. This API gave customers greater control over their deliveries and integrated seamlessly with Commerce Layer. This enabled BGE to ship more products without additional warehouse staff in the two years since the API was added.
Rotate° chose Commerce Layer for its singular, yet robust focus on commerce, providing an enterprise scale API that’s flexible, agile and lightweight without the bloat of comparable solutions.
With Commerce Layer, we confidently recommended their platform, knowing that it not only met Big Green Egg’s current business needs and would be adaptable as the business evolved. The platform's emphasis on a core feature set and fast API integration allowed us to seamlessly integrate only the necessary components for our project, seamlessly fitting into our wider architectural stack. It's a decision we have not looked back upon.
With a composable architecture, Rotate° and Big Green Egg can continue to create new, compelling and personalized shopping experiences marrying rich content, contextualized product and a flexible transaction engine for all their different customer personas.