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Works | ALDO

Crafting a Unified Phygital Experience for ALDO in 4 Countries

Company Brief

Aldo, founded in 1972 is a global fashion brand offering on-trend footwear and accessories. Now operating over 3,000 points of sale globally, their mid-range fashion enjoys a strong following in South East Asia with over 80 stores across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, operated by Montreal Pte Ltd, ALDO’s official partner for the region.

ALDO approached Codilar with a vision of building a fully unified omnichannel e-commerce platform to grow their customer base in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. They wanted to seamlessly integrate the physical and digital shopping experience.

Objectives &
Challenges

ALDO was already running their online store on Oracle SuiteCommerce in Singapore. Being an aged & SAAS platform, this had huge limitations in flexibility due to which they could not achieve their objectives and had started to impact the business growth.

Also, the existing platform license was due for annual renewal in 2 months, which meant we had to complete the replatforming in very short time, to prevent the unwanted cost.

  • Omnichannel Experience: ALDO already had a strong presence in the region with over 80 stores. They wanted to establish a revamped digital presence and offer an omnichannel shopping experience to the customers. They wanted to combine the in-store & e-store data including previous purchases, loyalty points, preferences etc to offer a seamless experience.
  • Loyalty Program: Being one of the world’s favourite brands, ALDO’s sales were mainly driven by their popular loyalty program A-List. They wanted to offer this to their online users as well, which meant deep integration of the existing POS / CRM systems to the ecommerce platform.
  • Powerful Promotion Engine: Similar to loyalty, ALDO also wanted to offer unified offers and promotions to both online and offline users. This needed a sophisticated promotion engine which could allow multi-layered discounting combined with loyalty points redemption.
  • Global Expansion: ALDO wanted to expand their digital presence into 4 countries in South East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia) and beyond, offering the users a fully localized experience (multi-currency, multi-lingual, local payment & shipping).

Solution Approach

We knew we were going to be part of something very big, right from our first meeting with ALDO. Adobe Commerce was the no-brainer solution that ALDO needed which could address all their key objectives. Sheer power and flexibility of Adobe Commerce also ensured that it could satiate the future requirements.

We had very short time and had to align all key stakeholders to the project to dig out deep insights and make the project a thumping success.

Workshops

Our team of Solution Specialists and Business Analysts flew to Singapore for in-person brainstorming with all the key stakeholders. We pulled in people from all Marketing, Brand, Technology and Management and had rigorous sessions to capture priceless insights. We had to ensure all the teams were aligned to the ambitious goal.

6 Weeks Project Plan

We charted out a 6 weeks plan with 3 sprints of 2 weeks each for designing, developing and launching the first Singapore website. The team formation consisted of Product Owner, UX Designer, Magento Backend Developers, Magento Frontend Developers, QA and Scrum-master.

Solution Highlights

Superior UX

We had to create a design system that aligned with the local customer persona while complying with the ALDO global standards. The output was a clean, minimal and elegant design across the website.

Single Customer View & Loyality

We developed deep integrations with Capillary CRM and Capillary Loyalty which allowed ALDO to have a single holistic view of all customers and unify their purchases and loyalty points. Customers can accumulate, view and redeem loyalty points across ecommerce and retail stores in realtime.

Unified Inventory

We integrated and exposed the stocks in all warehouses and stores to the Adobe Commerce platform leveraging the Multi Source Inventory (MSI) feature. The realtime and bi-directional integration offered new benefits.

  • Zero discrepancy in inventory data across systems
  • Optimum utilization of stocks
  • Endless Aisle for walk-in customers as they could now order products which are available anywhere in ALDO ecosystem

Omnichannel Order Orchestration

We implemented a system to seamlessly orchestrate the incoming orders from all the channels. We developed algorithms to efficiently assign inventory to each order based on the customer location, stock location and product availability. ALDO staff could also override the automatic assignment, if needed.
For example, if a customer ordered multiple products from one of the islands in Indonesia, the ALDO staff could easily assign the order, create internal transfers, print labels, request for pick-up etc from within the Adobe Commerce platform itself.

Multi-layered Promotion Engine

We developed a comprehensive promotion engine within Adobe Commerce integrating Capillary CRM and Loyalty. Customers. On a single cart, customers could simultaneously get category based discounts, apply coupon codes, redeem points, get additional discount based on Loyalty Tier and also redeem gift vouchers.

Multi-Website, Multi-Currency Multi-Lingual

Within the single Adobe Commerce instance, we built 4 websites for the 4 countries. Along with the default English language, Singapore had Mandarin, Malaysia had Malay, Thailand had Thai and Indonesia had Indonesian language. All 4 countries had 4 different currencies, 4 different payment gateways (Paypal, Stripe, iPay88, Bangkok Bank, Atome) and 4 different logistics partners (Ninjavan, Kerry, JNE).

Recommendations Powered by Adobe Sensei

We leveraged Adobe’s AI Engine, Sensei to populate recommended products based on customer’s browsing behavior.

Shoppable Instagram Feeds

Merchandisers could showcase celebrity and influencer photos from ALDO’s instagram handle directly on the website. Each photo can be made shoppable by tagging the products used in the photo to the actual products in the store.

Marketplace Integration

We implemented bi-directional integration between the Adobe Commerce platform and the 2 major marketplace platforms Lazada and Shopee. This helped the ALDO team to further increase stock efficiencies and orchestrate orders across all the 3 channels: Stores, Marketplaces and Ecommerce.

Results

  • First country Go-Live in 6 weeks
  • Doubled the Order Volume
  • Drastically reduced dead stocks, thanks to unified inventory across stores, warehouses, ecommerce, Lazada and Shopee.
  • Boosted conversions upto 150% with a superfast website and ALDO’s evergreen loyalty & promotions
  • Easier store operations (order orchestration content management, merchandising and promotions)
  • Reduced 15% Total Cost of ownership

Testimonials

A reliable, young and vibrant team, guided by seasoned tech leads and architects, is Codilar. We have customized Magento to the highest level to suffice our business needs within a short frame of time. Without Codilar, it would have been improbable…Thanks”

Vijay G

Head of Technology, ALDO Singapore

Recognitions

  • WINNER

Rising Star Partner of the Year

Codilar won this award as an agency for the successful implementation of ALDO project.

  • RUNNER UP

Adobe Experience Maker of the Year 2021

ALDO reaches the Top 3 finalist for the Experience Maker award as an Adobe Commerce merchant, nominated by Codilar.