Bolia developed an e-commerce platform in 2015 that delivers a unique shopping experience and combines B2B, B2C, and store systems in a single solution. The key concept behind it is unified commerce.
Unified Commerce
Bolia aims to offer its customers the world’s best seamless shopping experience, merging all Bolia channels so that customers experience a single, unified Bolia. The challenge is that Bolia operates a complex business with nearly 500,000 product variants, sales to both B2B and B2C, physical stores, and multiple languages and markets.
To deliver a truly personalized customer experience, Bolia needs to know each individual customer. To achieve this, Vertica recommended that Bolia follow the principles of unified commerce. This approach ensures a consistent experience across all channels—similar to omnichannel—but takes it a step further. With unified commerce, a single integrated software platform connects all touchpoints in real time.
Offline and online merge into one unified experience
Bolia provides customers with the same digital experience in every context. The webshop looks identical whether the customer browses on their iPad at home or explores the product range on in-store iPads and info stands. This creates familiarity and clarity for the customer.
After leaving the store, the sales assistant can send the customer an email with a shopping cart containing the products they discussed together. The customer can then browse the products at home and place an order with just a few clicks. This makes completing a purchase effortless.
Bolia effectively turns a physical store visit into a webshop sale—50% of Bolia’s revenue comes from in-store email offers that customers later act on from home.
Once a purchase is completed, Bolia follows up with personalized videos showing the products the customer bought. This ensures a seamless connection across all customer touchpoints before, during, and after a sale.
Click & Collect
To create even better integration between online and offline, Bolia has launched Click & Collect—a service where customers can choose to pick up the items they purchase online at their nearest store. This applies to accessories such as rugs, plates, and cutlery. When placing an order, the customer can see if the item is in stock at the chosen store and pick it up just a few hours later. Customers can also choose to collect smaller furniture items, like lamps, once they are ready for delivery.
Order management is handled directly through Bolia’s store system. When the system confirms that the store has received the order, the customer is notified via email or SMS that their item is ready for pickup. In addition to offering a convenient and flexible service, Click & Collect drives traffic to Bolia’s physical stores and helps increase additional sales.
Results
Bolia and Vertica have partnered for over 20 years, ensuring continuous development and optimisation of Bolia’s solution. Together, we have helped Bolia kickstart the rollout of their vision to create the world’s best omnichannel experience. This involved mapping all customer touchpoints and, through a series of strategic workshops, providing recommendations for architecture and system solutions.
Vertica is responsible for the interaction design, as well as the development and integration of the scalable e-commerce platform—a Cloud-based Optimizely-solution where all data on customers, products, and orders is consolidated in Elastic Search, while order management and financial operations run through AX. Uncle Grey delivered the new design.
With the latest relaunch of Bolia.com, Bolia now has a solution geared for international growth and a powerful tool for the marketing department. The platform ensures seamless dynamics across languages, markets, campaigns, B2B, B2C, and online and offline channels.
The new Bolia.com functions as both an e-commerce and branding platform, providing Bolia with a unified solution across all their systems—true unified commerce.
Nobody does e-commerce like Bolia.
Besøg Bolia.com og lad dig inspirere.
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