How Cuisinart cooked up a new ecommerce website

In a year dedicated to online shopping, brands raising their ecommerce game has been a trend, but for Cuisinart, a full-service culinary resource used by professionals and the private sector, their top priority in building a new ecommerce site was future-proofing the new site for continuous growth. 

“The new website is heavily data-driven, with over a dozen complex integrations,” said Cuisinart Director of Marketing Mary M. Rodgers. 

To accomplish their long-term organizational goals of customer journey optimization and direct-to-consumer sales, Cuisinart, a division of the Conair Corporation, selected digital agency Whereoware that was already their agency for data optimization and email marketing services. 

Because of their prior relationship, the website re-purposing project was able to be accomplished in only six months. The new ecommerce website is now highly data-driven and creates business growth for retail partners. 

“The new site provides a better user experience and website administration,” said Whereoware EVP Teya Tuccio-Flick. “There is less editing that needs to be done and now Cuisinart can manage their own images without waiting.” 

Serving up a new site

To accomplish their goal of future-proofing the website for continuous growth, Cuisinart selected Episerver’s Digital Experience Platform’s commerce solution because of its flexibility and the ability to service Cuisinart’s expanding distribution channels. 

“The new Episerver site aligns data to personalize the experience and create more relevant content,” said Tuccio-Flick. “Now we can base content on product affinity, so we can offer kid-friendly recipes with products to customers who have kids. The new site offers content that matters to end users, which are the customers.” 

Episerver’s intuitive platform allowed Cuisinart to gain independent control of their product data and search engine optimization while launching a mobile-friendly browsing experience for thousands of product SKUs. 

With the Episerver platform in place, Cuisinart and Whereoware selected nearly a dozen vendors to complete the new ecommerce experience: Salesforce marketing cloud was used for the shopping cart; Acoustic for the marketing automation platform; Registria for product registration; Numerator and Salsify for retail services; and Bazaarvoice for customer reviews. 

“Cuisinart is really evolving from a product company to a lifestyle-driven brand,” said Tuccio-Flick. “Achieving that requires full control over presence and platform. All of the vendors used were able to help grow and evolve with Cuisinart’s changing needs while giving them more control to improve content to keep it fresh and current for their customers. These enhancements make it easier to do that.” 

Those enhancements include product detail pages that feature high quality product imagery and video, full product detail information and specs, improved Favorites functionality, and promotion of Cuisinart’s retailer partners. Extensive back-end data feeds drive the product detail page content to ease the pressure of Cuisinart’s team from manual updates, including warranties, manuals, related parts and accessories, ratings and retailer logos. 

“Previously used files now use an API for website data and tracking information from user data,” said Tuccio-Flick. “The new experience drives greater customer engagement and personalization, from cart abandonment emails, past purchase recommendations and personalized messages from the end of consumer transactions.”

Further personalization from the new ecommerce site includes data-driven reviews and recipes, as well as detailed consumer journeys into the product experience to further brand engagement. 

“The site has recently launched so we are still measuring impact,” said Tuccio-Flick. “We have enabled personalization and engagement for consumers, but it also bolsters the retail partners.” 

Include the marketing team

The ability for Cuisinart to complete the entire project in only six months was due to efficient project management and the fact that Whereoware had a previous relationship with Cuisinart providing data optimization and email marketing services. 

“We already had a strong relationship with Cuisinart, so we had a lot of historical knowledge,” said Tuccio-Flick. “Because we already had ongoing communications they were quick to provide feedback and it took a lot of client and service provider coordination to get the project done. It was an extremely organized process.”

The Confluence project collaboration tool was used to track tasks and provide feedback and Jira was used as a project development tool to keep the team organized and to stay on task. 

While the transformation of most ecommerce sites will take longer than six months, Whereoware identified a valuable lesson that can be learned by marketers. 

“One of the lessons we learned is that typical marketers are not involved in these projects as much as they should be,” said Tuccio-Flick. “This project included the Cuisinart marketing team which helped tremendously in the efficiency and our ability to meet deadlines while driving their business forward.”