DEVELOPING A GLOBAL HEADLESS DEPLOYMENT IN RECORD TIME

A MID-PROJECT PIVOT

The initial engagement with Fitbit was to leverage BigCommerce to deliver a cart and checkout solution that could support 44 languages across 20+ countries and 14 currencies. But one country in particular, Singapore, had an urgent opportunity to support Fitbit’s global ambition of being more present in the health and fitness marketplace. In this new partnership between the Singapore government and Fitbit, Singapore residents would receive a fully subsidized Fitbit Inspire HR or Fitbit Versa Lite with the purchase of a yearly subscription to Fitbit Premium. All that was needed was a commerce interface to facilitate this value exchange.

The original plan was to deploy Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as the content delivery engine to be able to support this and future country initiatives. Fitbit was preparing to deliver a fallback solution through their current-state, home-grown platform.

Looking at their business holistically, Guidance knew there had to be a better way. We proposed an ambitious option that uses BigCommerce where we could deploy all the features of the future state platform minus Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). While FitBit has a limited number of SKUs, we knew this health and fitness solution could scale globally to thousands of health and fitness providers. Creating thousands of instances for each provider was both impractical and cost-prohibitive so we devised clever workarounds which allowed Fitbit to deliver an alternative user experience through a unique Fitbit health and fitness partner interface. This interface could authenticate and authorize health and fitness provider members, display custom product catalog products unique to each health and fitness provider, customize discounts, subsidies and eligible bundles for their members and provide subscription purchase functionality.

In just six weeks, we were able to deliver an alternative user experience for Fitbit customers while also satisfying the needs of Singapore’s health and fitness providers. We were also able to test the shopping cart and checkout solutions in a lower risk market.

GLOBAL CART AND CHECKOUT SOLUTION

With the Singapore health and fitness initiative deployed in a record time of just six weeks and the cart and checkout experience stress-tested, we went back to the original project of delivering a cart and checkout solution that could support 44 languages across 20+ countries and 14 currencies. Localization of the cart and checkout experience was critical. As the most critical revenue pages, developing a cart and checkout solution for one country can in itself be a challenge. A solution for 20+ countries requires different tax solutions, multiple payment gateways, various address verifications, diverse currencies and much more. In fact, over 60 different integrations were required for this global solution.

APIs FOR SPEED AND FLEXIBILITY

To compound this challenge, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) did not have a commerce connector for BigCommerce. Guidance was tasked with creating a solution compatible with AEM. Our solution was to develop a “Commerce Library”, a front end JavaScript library that provides a simplified but well defined interface for triggering commerce features within the context of Adobe driven content. The library provided features like add to cart, triggering checkout and the display of the shopping cart. This was all that was needed within the context of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and the Commerce Library could take responsibility for everything else the user would want including the actual display of the shopping cart, adding/removing items, updating existing items and completing everything through a Single Page Application (SPA) shopping cart and user experience. All of this was achievable through APIs, one of the key benefits of headless commerce. Despite this solution, the Commerce Library was just one piece of a complex integration puzzle.

A COMPLEX COLLABORATION

Deploying the future state platform was a team effort and required a complex collaboration between multiple development teams including Guidance as owners of the global cart and checkout experience, Fitbit, the CMS agency as well as multiple integration partners.

With multiple teams responsible for different components of the architecture/solution, all working towards different objectives and timelines, it proved challenging to arrive at an integrated solution at a schedule that aligned with the business demand.

DOZENS OF COMPLEX INTEGRATIONS

The 60 points of integration including Product Information Management (PIM), address verification, payment services and many of these services were not ready throughout the project because they had to be customized and developed. The future state platform suffered as a result of all these decentralized dependencies. Guidance looked to reduce the dependencies, drive agility and autonomy and take ownership of more than just the cart and checkout experience.

THE POWER OF STAND-IN SOLUTIONS

Our workaround was to create stand-in solutions, demonstrating the functionality of all the other dependencies, so we could continue our development on the commerce portion including User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

Guidance stood up an integration environment that utilized the pieces of the future state architecture that we knew would be in place and tied it all together. From integrating the middleware, to integrating the commerce to integrating the front end commerce library, we created an environment that allowed us to exercise the features of the future state solution and engage the client, partners and Q/A team so we could validate the solution we were building.

Our ability to pivot and show how these different “heads” of the overall architecture are interchangeable demonstrates yet another benefit of headless commerce. Guidance took ownership of driving the future state platform to completion demonstrating a true partnership with Fitbit.