Grohe

But in the U.S. and Canadian markets, Grohe lacked the direct-to-consumer channel it needed to meet the demands of the market and fulfill customer expectations. While rival manufacturers were driving sales through their websites, Grohe's North American brand still relied heavily on outside vendors (Home Depot, Wayfair, etc.) as its retail distribution partners. Meeting the demands of the market and customer expectations, Grohe pivoted and supplemented their distribution strategy by adding a direct-to-consumer sales channel through the power of Sitecore Experience Commerce.

Grohe-North America reached out to us with an urgent request. After a previous partner's installation of Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) had hit a snag and destabilized the manufacturer's website, Grohe needed us to take on a rescue mission.

To make matters worse, Grohe's site was hampered by limited ecomm functionality and could only handle retail transactions for parts and accessories (a small portion of its complete catalog).

To help Grohe escape its supply chain shell, the decision was made to leverage Sitecore XC. Since the site was already hosted on Sitecore XP, Sitecore XC enabled us to maximize existing technologies for a seamless integration — while giving digital marketers control of the shopping experience.

Our vision: A friction-free experience for web visitors. To deliver on this goal, we teamed up with LIXIL's digital marketing, product and technology teams to define key requirements. On the back end, we implemented a performant, stable and secure back-end engine equipped to handle a large product catalog and support transactions.

Bolster end-to-end ecomm functionality through back-office integrations

Next, we integrated a suite of back-office tools to reinforce the Sitecore XC platform. From fraud protection to shipment tracking to ratings and reviews, we synced these third-party technologies to Sitecore XC to provide end-to-end commerce functionality.

For future scale, we built Grohe's ecomm platform on a foundation primed to support multiple brands, regions and product catalogs. On the technology side, we ensured that the large volume of product data being ingested from Stibo was displayed accurately — including product description, specs, pricing and more.

During our research and discovery phase, we mapped out shopping flows and interactions across Grohe's homepage, category pages, product detail pages and the cart and checkout process — all with purchase and conversion strategies in mind.