RMO re-platforms from Magento to VTEX to scale their next level of growth, enter new markets and attract new customers.
Industry: Health & Beauty
Service: CX Strategy, Experience & eCommerce Platform Implementation
Technology: VTEX
Market: North America
At a Glance:
17 years in business
500k+ customers
700k+ order history data
7 months migration to launch
Getting to Know RMO
Rocky Mountain Oils (RMO) is a beauty & essential oils company born out of the founder's love for nature and the healing properties of the earth. RMO founder Michael Vincent in his early years was drawn to the idea of finding alternate ways for people to take care of their health, body and mind.
As he got older, Michael started researching natural wellness and essential oils, leading a path to create a high-quality essential oils company with a vision to make essential oils available to everyone and anyone. Founded on the principles of honesty and integrity, RMO strives to provide trustworthy products to customers.
Adopting a Digital First Mindset
Unlike most family businesses that start with a brick and mortar store, RMO always wanted to engage with their customers through a digital channel. Their vision to provide a platform where customers can not only purchase essential oils but also provide a sense of community for authentic information about essential oils led them to adopt a digital first mindset.
RMO started off on a small ecommerce platform which met the needs of their customers in the initial years. With steady year over year growth, RMO had to migrate off to multiple platforms to meet their growing needs until they reached a stage where they realized they needed a platform that could scale seamlessly and enable them to become the leading brand of essential oils across the globe.
Achieving such an ambitious goal required deploying a powerful new digital commerce solution, creating a complete migration roadmap, and engaging the right expertise to make such a complex project a success. VTEX was chosen for the commerce platform and Trika Technologies was tapped to lead the transformation effort. The net result? An on-time migration delivery that resulted in a X% improvement in order conversion and a whopping X% improvement in Net Promoter Score (NPS) while establishing a customer-centric, agile, and scalable architecture for future digital growth.
Challenge: A Massive Commerce & Content Data Migration
With RMO’s vision to provide a digital ecommerce platform where customers can not only purchase products, but also digitally share their experiences with other community members, unifying commerce and content was the key differentiator. Coming off of the legacy Magento 1 platform, RMO’s VTEX implementation involved migrating the huge backlog of content and commerce data into VTEX that included more than 200k+ registered customers, close to a million order history data and 200+ content pages.
Moving from a monolithic operation where the additions of any new functionality could take weeks or even months— to an environment of continuous delivery on VTEX also required a cultural and process shift on RMO’s team. Combining the onset of a global pandemic, the engineering teams were forced to adapt rapidly to the new intricacies of working remotely, a situation that lasted throughout the entire migration.
“We moved from Magento to VTEX so we can convert more mobile traffic, the new mobile experience is night and day difference. Working with Trika has been our best experience in the last 4 moves over 17 years. Their team is very responsive and go above and beyond.”
Michael Vincent, Founder, Rocky Mountain Oils
Solution: Technical & Cultural Innovation
RMO chose VTEX, the digital enterprise commerce SaaS platform, as their technology for the next level of growth. Trika was selected to lead the migration and, from the beginning, promoted the culture of creative innovation driven by continuous insights and collective intelligence of all the stakeholders involved in the project.
This approach helped create a collaborative environment where they could create and prioritize the product roadmap. While Trika’s typical approach includes execution in agile methodology supporting an environment of change to meet client’s expectations.
RMO’s migration to VTEX included building the storefront experience designed to meet modern customer usability needs and loosely coupling the front end with the backend platform enabling a layer of headless approach. RMO’s content first approach needed building the huge number of semi static pages into VTEX which was easily enabled through manageable templates by the business users.
One of the key aspects of the implementation involved building the third party integrations needed to support the various marketing, fulfilment and payment integration needs of RMO which was seamlessly achieved through VTEX’s pre-built apps with the third party systems. Notable apps leveraged involved Klaviyo for email marketing, Turnto for product ratings & reviews, Braintree for credit card payments, Taxjar for sales tax calculations and Wordpress for blog management.
The other third party integrations were achieved through VTEX IO apps for core backend systems such as Drop Stream for order fulfilment, Fishbowl for real time inventory sync, Loyalty Lion for loyalty and rewards management.
Using a model of working in squads and promoting a culture of rapid experimentation based on the motto “learning by doing,” an immense volume of data migrations were accomplished. In fact, 500k+ clients & 700k+ order data were successfully migrated to VTEX within the proposed timeframe. The robust data importing mechanism of VTEX was leveraged to its fullest to accomplish this critical data migration activity.
The Trika and VTEX engineering teams were involved throughout the development cycle to mitigate risks and ensure a stable integration between the VTEX platform with RMO’s operational processes. The entire effort, led by Trika and VTEX, followed a safe and sustainable path on the journey of digital transformation. In the process, the engineers defined a scalable architecture while adopting a new software engineering approach that incorporated continuous delivery, testing and automated deployments.
Result: Customer Experiences That Drive More Business
1.Growth in conversion rates
Since the new platform was deployed, RMO has seen a significant growth in conversion rates. New functionality can be activated in just minutes, and improvements and innovations are made available daily to RMO customers. The customer’s purchase journey and the management of RMO’s operational processes have been optimized to allow for better customer experiences.
This was achieved using a variety of tools and solutions integrated with the RMO ecosystem, including:
A responsive experience for customers for browsing and shopping journey
An experience led design for informational content on various health related topics based on product lines
An improved product taxonomy structure enabling customers to easily discover products based on their health needs
New and better ways to create promotions
An improved checkout experience with SmartCheckout, allowing consumers to securely purchase with a single click without the need to enter a password
An omnichannel experience that enables the consumer to choose the most convenient way to pay for and receive products
Additional customer payment options
A unified front end and backend application creating operational efficiency for business users
Conclusion
This successful 7-month migration project laid a solid foundation for RMO to continue an accelerated process of digital growth. Their ongoing focus on providing the best possible customer experience will drive future platform updates that further increase customer loyalty and sales—the perfect result of using new technologies as business enablers.