Bang & Olufsen makes ecommerce gains selling audio products with Contentful

Introduction

Luxury Danish headphone and speaker maker Bang & Olufsen knows that the secret to pleasing online customers is to meet them where they were at — in their unique regions and languages, and on both personal devices and in-store displays. But, for many years, the brand didn’t have the tools to get there. It relied on a single monolithic platform where ecommerce tools and a content management system were combined.

Bang & Olufsen’s coupled setup limited its ability to connect with individual customers and communicate a consistent message across multiple channels. Despite investing in a single platform, the brand was serving customers a disjointed experience. The brand’s product website — where customers could browse audio offerings — and digital store — where customers checked out — were separate sites. Plus, Bang & Olufsen struggled to connect online and in-store sales systems.

Moving faster with microservices

A microservice structure with headless components solved Bang & Olufsen’s problems. This deconstructed architecture gave the brand’s marketing and development team the necessary flexibility to design and implement fluid customer experiences online and in stores.

Bang & Olufsen deployed Contentful, which is built on AWS, as its composable content platform. It then integrated Commercetools, one of several ecommerce tools available in the Contentful Marketplace, to satisfy its checkout and storefront needs. Contentful’s extensibility, quick response times, and support for the creation and publishing of a wide range of content largely motivated the decision to rebuild and their preference for that specific platform. The ease with which Contentful and Commercetools integrated with one another — and other components — created a pull as well. Such a capability would enable Bang & Olufsen to expand its tooling in the future. It could include any number of microservices needed.

Powered by Contentful and Commercetools, Bang & Olufsen merged its two websites into one. Such a change enabled customers to learn about and purchase the latest products in a single digital experience. It also connected their ecommerce and all in-store IT systems. Contentful populates in-store digital experiences with consistent content, regardless of the store’s presentation technology.

The numbers say it all

Tomas Krag, Director of Ecommerce at Bang & Olufsen, said they’ve been tracking the numbers. The following facts and figures confirm the introduction of a content platform has brought value to the organization:

- Load times decreased from 16-20 seconds to 3-4 seconds.

- The ecommerce conversion rate increased by 60%.

- The cart-to-checkout rate of progression more than doubled.

- The average order value has increased by 27%.

- The conversion rate from online store search tripled.

Bang & Olufsen isn’t the only enterprise to trust Contentful when moving from a monolithic architecture to a microservices stack. Forrester Research Inc. says that Contentful’s “API-first and cloud-native approach excels,” and that “Contentful is a good fit for progressive digital initiatives that want to unify content services across channels and projects.”