Sleeping Easier With a Modular Ecommerce Solution

The Tough Business of a Comfortable Sleep

Buying a mattress is a major investment. Not only do consumers spend a fair amount of money on them, they also spend quite a lot of time on them – between a quarter and a third of their lives. They're also an uncommon and often reluctant purchase, as people think they should be replaced every six to eight years, but often wait 12-15 years to do so. It had been a high-touch experience as well, until direct-to-consumer brands finally figured out how to sell them successfully online in the 2010s.

Mancini's Sleepworld had thrived with dozens of locations in Northern California for more than 50 years, and as the industry shifted, Mancini's adapted. They launched an ecommerce site that allows customers to purchase online, for regional delivery within Mancini's market area. It also helped insulate them somewhat from the effects of "showrooming" – the practice of trying out an item in a brick-and-mortar location before purchasing it for less online.

However, Mancini's faced a challenge common to many SMBs and SMEs – they had a talented but small IT team that had to rely on outside developers to implement frequent code releases for their ecommerce site. In Mancini's case, those deployments were happening every two days on average, because of how far out-of-the-box their current ecommerce site had been customized.

After a comprehensive audit, Guidance recommended a migration to Salesforce, and a redesign that would take advantage of Salesforce's Commerce Cloud and B2C Commerce Page Designer to create easy-to-update templates and modules. To ensure the replatforming would work with the Furniture Retail Operations Group (FROG) solution Mancini’s uses for enterprise resource planning (ERP) purposes, Guidance scoped out a series of custom integrations for passing data efficiently from payment processors to the ERP. These changes allowed Mancini's to take full control of their platform, streamlining their site maintenance and product management.

Setting the Foundation

Mattresses need a solid foundation – like a box spring, slats, or a platform – to support your body and help you get the best sleep. Ecommerce websites also need a solid foundation, but for Mancini's, it was becoming too difficult to support their highly customized Magento install. Over the years, their team had accrued significant technical debt, such that any updates needed for the site were code-based, and often had to be performed by outside developers.

This wasn't just a backend issue, as code releases also affected the customer experience on the frontend. For example, California requires the payment of a recycling fee for any mattress or box spring sold, to support the state's mattress recycling program. If Mancini's wanted to change the price of the recycling fee on their website or turn it off during a promotional period so it wouldn't be included in the final price of a mattress, they had to wait for a code release to do so.

With the migration to Salesforce, Guidance was able to implement a comprehensive content management system for Mancini's. A templatized block library allows Mancini's team to add, edit, and rearrange content with no coding required. Guidance also extended Salesforce Commerce Cloud by creating custom preferences so Mancini's team could quickly make changes (like the one in the recycling fee example, as well as promotions and custom checkout logic) without waiting for developers to handle code releases.

Simplifying a Challenging Product Detail Page

Mattresses are one of the more complex consumer products on the market. And for the average consumer, it's almost impossible to make any meaningful comparisons just by looking at them. From a website perspective, conveying the volume of relevant information on a product detail page (PDP) without overwhelming the consumer is challenging at best.

To create a strategic solve for this, Guidance referred to elements of custom iconography Mancini’s had created and expanded upon them – in essence, defining a visual language that consumers could grasp at a glance. Important features such as cooling technology or motion separation are clearly highlighted, rather than being lost in a sea of bullet points or within a product detail dropdown. The content management system Guidance implemented also lends itself to easily tagging SKUs with their relevant attributes during product import.

The sale of a mattresses online may also involve upsells, promotions, and free gifts with purchase, all of which can vary by SKU. Guidance ensured that all of these possibilities were presented in a meaningful way as well, while keeping the focus on a strong "Add to Cart" call to action. Because mattresses can also be an expensive purchase, Guidance helped Mancini's implement the buy-now-pay-later service Affirm as another payment option.

Additionally, Guidance built custom cartridges to seamlessly integrate Power Reviews into Mancini’s Salesforce solution, to incorporate user-generated content on PDPs and product landing pages (PLPs).

Intentional Use of Color

Blue is an established brand color for Mancini's. And color is, among other things, another way to present and highlight information. As part of the engagement, Guidance created a style guide and designed a clean, easy-to digest page layout that elevates the brand experience. The shade of blue Guidance chose as their primary color delivers contrast in a way that's not only pleasing, but also compliant with accessibility best practices.

To make sure customers would be able to quickly focus on key elements within a page, Guidance also selected a complementary orange and deployed it judiciously. Banners, pricing discounts, and the "Add to Cart" buttons stand out without making pages appear cluttered, delivering additional visual clarity to the site. The result is both refined and strategic.

Color also plays a role in Mancini's unique SleepMatch system for pairing people with the perfect type of mattress. Based on various attributes, they've divided their products into four firmness categories, with a color code for each (red for extra firm, for example). Guidance's deliberate use of color takes the SleepMatch system into account as well. SKUs on the product landing pages include a dot of color representing the SleepMatch category in which a certain mattress falls.

Reversing Directions

You might expect a retailer to want to drive customer traffic to a website, where it's more profitable to sell their products. Considering the high-touch experience of mattress sales, however, driving traffic to a brick-and-mortar location is just as reasonable. And since Mancini's operates and delivers within a specific geographic region, there had to be clear boundaries for what customers could and couldn’t do on the website.

Guidance developed a store locator system for Mancini's and made it easy for their team to maintain individual store detail pages through the templates created by Guidance. Additional information is loaded into the page by location ID, including a map and directions features, and Google and Yelp reviews.

With the "Set as My Store" feature, Mancini's is also able to indicate on PDPs whether the selected mattress is out on the showroom floor at the chosen store, so a customer knows they can try it out in person. They're also able to offer delivery estimates based on the zip code of the selected store.

Finding the Right Mattress With SEO

Furthering the cause of getting customers away from their computers and onto Mancini’s mattresses, Guidance ensured that each brick-and-mortar’s individual location page on the site could be optimized for local SEO, using Page Designer as their CMS. The rest of the site’s search engine optimization is also easily managed through the CMS, including the custom schema work that Guidance performed within Salesforce Commerce Cloud.