Master Modern Commerce: Deliver Seamless Omnichannel Experiences with KIBO

Transcript

KIBO eCommerce powers and equips a wide variety of business types across many verticals, such as apparel, wholesalers, distributors, specialty retailers, and more. But today, we’re going to take a look at our eCommerce capabilities through the lens of a B2C omnichannel sporting goods retailer.

In this short demonstration, we’re going to explore the front end shopping experience.

We’re going to take a look at products and catalog management, merchandising for both categories and the on-site search, creating promotions, flexible content management options, customer management and servicing, and subscriptions, all through the path of a single cohesive consumer journey.

Let’s start by meeting Jordan. She’s an adventure seeker and loves being outdoors.

She lives in Denver, Colorado and enjoys buying new outdoor and sporting gear. She’s made plans for a backpacking trip with friends in the mountains this month and is going to need some supplies.

Jordan’s particular about getting what she wants, where she wants it, and when she wants it. And because of this, she’s developed some loyalty with a particular sporting goods retailer, Mystic Sports. They’re customer experience obsessed, and they’ve really been able to deliver on that promise, which is why Jordan keeps coming back.

It’s Thursday afternoon, the day before the trip, and Jordan is home packing. While loading out, she realizes her tent has a hole in it. Not ideal, but not a big problem as she needed to place an order for other supplies anyways.

She jumps on the Mystic Sports site and starts looking for new tents.

As soon as she gets to the homepage, she notices the backpack her partner has been wanting is now on sale, so she decides to go ahead and purchase that now, in addition to the new tent. Their birthday is coming up soon.

She then navigates to the tents category page where she can fasten and filter, including the ability to filter for items that are available at her store.

One of the things she loves most about Mystic’s site is that they always have real-time available inventory listed right on the product page, whether it’s for items she’s shipping to her house or wants to pick up in store. It really makes her purchasing decisions easy. If something is out of stock, she gets information on when it might be back in stock, and then she can choose to wait or if she needs to choose another product. They’ll also give her the option to opt in and decide on substitute products if something’s not available, and the recommendations they have are always spot on.

Looks like they have the tent she needs at her store, which is on her way out of town. That’s convenient, especially since she has some boots that she needs to return, and doing that in store would be a lot easier than shipping them back. And she isn’t gonna make the same mistake on this tent that she did on the last one, so she decides to go ahead and purchase that two-year warranty as an add on.

Once she gets to the cart, Jordan recalls that she got an email with a discount code from Mystic recently that would give her 10% off her entire order. Now that she thinks about it, she needs a new hat that protects her against sun exposure.

Much easier than applying sunscreen on her face every few hours. Might as well purchase a new one since she’ll be able to save a little money with the promotion.

She navigates to the search bar and looks for hats with SPF protection.

Mystic has taken advantage of KIBO’s vector search, meaning that AI is assisting in her search results. It understands that what she’s meaning to look up is a hat with a UPF rating, and returns those results instead.

She finds one she likes, but it’s not available at her preferred store.

It’s available at a store across town. Even though she wasn’t originally counting on it for the trip, it would actually be really nice to take with her. She doesn’t have the time to drive across town for it with packing today and leaving tomorrow.

That’s when she remembers that Mystic offers same day delivery. She clicks delivery on the product page and chooses a time to have it delivered later that afternoon.

Mystic is really making this easy to get everything she needs.

One more thing. She has enough dried food to get her through this trip, but wants to set up a recurring purchase that will ensure she always has enough on hand, especially for those last-minute day trips that come up. She navigates to those meal bars she likes, adjusts the quantity, and chooses the frequencies she wants them sent to her at home.

Really, they’re good enough to eat any day. May as well grab a few more, especially since she suspects her partner has been raiding her stash too.

Unlike other commerce vendors, KIBO provides a native subscription commerce service as part of its core platform. This allows for the ability to create and manage subscriptions on the storefront.

Subscriptions can be digital or physical products or services.

KIBO also allows brands to have a mixed cart experience, so customers can purchase subscriptions alongside one-time products in one cart with omnichannel fulfillment options.

Now that she’s got everything she needs, time to check out.

She already forgot about the promotion for 10% off. This really has been a productive shopping journey. She was able to add all of the items into a single cart regardless of how she chose to receive them. The tent pickup on her way out of town, the birthday backpack for her partner being shipped directly to her home, getting the hat delivered from another store, and making sure she’s always got a supply of those meal bars around without having to think about it. This is why she loves shopping with Mystic. They just seem to make everything so easy.

Jordan then proceeds to checkout, and Mystic has conveniently stored her shopping address as well as her credit card, making for a quick and expedited checkout experience.

Now that was obviously an easy shopping experience, but we all know that creating that journey is a lot more complicated than it seems behind the scenes. KIBO helps make this experience consistent on the front end while managing the complexity seamlessly on the back end. Let’s get into the KIBO platform and see how the Mystic Sports ecommerce experience was created.

This is KIBO’s administrative UI.

For the purposes of this demonstration, we’re logged in as a super admin, but roles and permissions can be granularly configured for any user type, like a customer service representative, a channel manager, an ecommerce operations person, finance, etcetera.

On the left hand side, we’ll see the groupings of the core functionality, including the catalog, marketing tools, search, publishing, orders, subscriptions, fulfiller for stores and warehouses to pick, pack, and ship orders, order routing, customers, call center for CSRs to assist customers, and reporting.

You can also see the specific B2B capabilities here. One of KIBO’s strengths is around managing B2C and B2B use cases on the same platform.

As an API-first platform and a microservices based solution, KIBO’s own administrative UI is built on the KIBO API, so anything I demonstrate here today can be done via API or from an external system.

Let’s start by looking into the product catalog.

KIBO provides out-of-the-box support for multiple master and child catalogs, and KIBO also provides a quick edit tool for making adjustments to products in bulk.

Within a product, merchants can configure short and long descriptions, product images, pricing.

Natively tied in with the KIBO inventory microservice, users can configure inventory behavior, manage product variance or options with product slicing, and configure product attributes.

All of KIBO’s product attributes are fully extensible, allowing for merchants to define the product attributes and data type, assign them to the desired product types, and then configure them.

KIBO also allows users to define product extras, enabling use cases such as monogramming or gift wrapping. If you remember on the website, we used a product extra to purchase a warranty on Jordan’s tent. Users can configure these shipping and delivery types for the products, as well as managing the SEO.

For products managed in multiple catalogs, merchants can choose to inherit the product data from the master catalog or override individual child catalog sections.

For example, we wanna sell the same product, but put it on sale at our outlet store.

Now let’s take a look at the merchandising and category pages in search results.

KIBO provides the ability for merchants to create both static and dynamic rules based categories.

Once categories are created, users can create merchandising rules for that category.

For example, in the tent category, we can easily go in, see the order of the products based on a keyword or category label, and create conditions, also known as boost and bury, or configure sort rules and block products from displaying.

In this example, let’s say we want to boost products based on margin, and then resort those results based on product rating.

We can easily set our condition as margin with a custom value, then set rating as the sort definition, then preview the results.

We can then manually adjust or pin products in place to achieve the results we want.

Now let’s take a look at search merchandising.

As a microservices-based platform, KIBO can offer its search product as a standalone solution for a composable commerce stack, or it can be provided seamlessly within our eCommerce platform. Merchandisers can manage the search results for the on-site search as well as the product and category suggestions.

Search merchandisers can configure the core search settings, enable spell correction, and have full control over indexing and field weighting.

Vector search is a search method that doesn’t rely on matching words to a query.

After using machine learning on a large dataset, documents are associated with vectors, and then the search query checks those vectors to find the most similar results.

This provides the benefits of retrieving results based on the meaning of the search query rather than simply matching words or phrases, also referred to as a semantic search.

Jordan was able to make use of vector search when shopping for her hat with SPF protection, which returned the relevant UPF results.

KIBO also provides UIs and bulk editing tools to manage search synonyms and redirects, as well as merchandising rules that can be enabled globally or at individual search queries.

These configurable search rules and merchandising tools help KIBO’s clients drive revenue and a customer centric shopping experience.

Let’s go take a look at another tool that KIBO provides to help drive revenue, which is our discounting engine.

If you remember, Jordan’s discount offered her 10% off of her entire order. Let me show you how to easily set up that discount.

As we recreate the promotion, we see all of the different promotion types we offer.

Including a dollar off, a free item, fixed price, auto add of product, and even subscription specific promotions.

Discount conditions let us see the rules that need to be met in order to qualify for this discount, which in this example is purchasing over $500. And the target criteria would be what the discount applies toward.

For example, if we were doing a spend $500 and get 20% off of a sleeping bag, we would configure that here.

Attribute conditions allow you to configure logic based on custom attributes that have been enabled for discounts.

This gives you more flexibility in how discounts can be applied, such as offering discounts to customers with a specific loyalty point level.

Threshold messaging can be enabled to let shoppers know about discounts that may apply to their order, such as being within a certain dollar amount. We can make sure that the messaging shows in the cart and can configure the message that we want shown, and the system will do the calculation for us.

Lastly, we’ll determine our discount limitations.

We could decide if this is a one-time discount, if it requires a coupon code or not, and could even generate a list of unique coupon codes. On top of the discount capabilities, KIBO also offers price lists.

Price lists enable unique prices and price tiers for individual customers, customer segments, B2B, and more.

Now that we’ve looked at pricing and promotions, let’s take a peek at how KIBO enables the content of Mystic Sports.

From its inception, KIBO has been an API-first, microservices-based platform.

We’re a composable platform that enables headless deployments, and we’re focused on providing flexibility for clients to choose their own front ends or content management systems.

While many merchants desire the benefits and flexibility of a headless deployment, there also exists a huge gap in the time, expertise, and resources that it takes to put together this headless experience.

In order to solve that problem, KIBO offers brands the flexibility of pre-built CMS integrations, as well as a fully built storefront that retailers of B2B companies could reuse.

Today, KIBO provides pre-built CMS integrations to Builder, Contentstack, Contentful, and Ampliance that we can see here. KIBO also provides pre built storefronts with Vue Storefront, React Storefront, and Next.js Commerce.

These storefronts are great starter kits for simplistic online scenarios, but KIBO also provides more omnichannel and B2B-specific storefront accelerators, such as KIBO Go. KIBO Go is the first ever pre-composed commerce solution for wholesalers and distributors, built in partnership with Smith Commerce.

KIBO currently offers a B2C omnichannel-focused storefront built on Vue and Nuxt, and another one built on React and Next.

These storefronts are meant to make it easier and quicker for our clients to go live in a composable fashion with the front end of their choice, while also getting to leverage the breadth of KIBO’s capabilities out of the box.

As an example, what we’re looking at now is the React Next Accelerator that’s available with the KIBO Commerce platform.

This storefront comes out of the box with all of KIBO’s advanced commerce capabilities, such as product options and extras, multiple fulfillment types, store level inventory visibility, omnichannel capabilities such as BOPIS or global ATP inventory, wishlist, and one click checkout.

In summary, we offer a few different approaches to content. KIBO has pre-built headless pieces that our customers can put together, including pre-built CMS integrations and front end accelerators and starter kits. Since KIBO is primarily an open API-first platform, brands can always choose any custom CMS or front end that is desired.

Forty-five minutes after Jordan placed her order on Mystic, she remembers her coffee pot was lost after the last camping trip, and there is no way she can go without coffee in the morning.

Since she’s out running errands for the trip, and is afraid that if she doesn’t take care of it now, she’ll forget, she decides to call Mystic’s customer support to see if they can place another order for her. Hopefully, they have something in stock at the same store she’s picking the tent up at, and having a few orders placed there doesn’t complicate things.

Jordan reaches one of Mystic’s friendly CSRs, Alex.

Alex is able to locate Jordan’s recent order through the call center menu.

But can also access her account details and any returns she’s made.

Alex can get a full view of her customer account. He can click into Jordan’s account and see that she spent over ninety thousand dollars with Mystic Sports. Wow. What an amazing customer. And she’s been with them since two thousand nineteen.

She’s in multiple customer segments, providing her unique pricing and discounting, and he can see all of the orders Jordan has placed as well as her subscriptions with Mystic Sports.

Alex finds Jordan’s current order and clicks into it in her customer account, which opens up the orders menu. Here, he can scroll down and click the edit details button and search for the coffee pot she’s looking for.

Alex immediately puts Jordan at ease. Not only do they have the exact same coffee pot she ordered two years prior, it is in stock at the same store location.

And what’s better, Alex can add that item to the same order Jordan placed earlier, so there’s no need to worry about juggling multiple orders.

Luckily for Jordan, Mystic has taken advantage of KIBO’s configurable shipment release.

Typically, shipments are created immediately upon order submission, which in Jordan’s case would require a separate order or shipment to be created.

But with configurable shipment release, shipment creation can be delayed for a predetermined amount of time, meaning Jordan’s coffee pot can be added to the same order as all of her other items.

We can make any other adjustments to the order as well, such as applying promotions and price lists, editing items and totals, or adjusting shipping.

Now, we’ve seen a lot in a very short period of time. KIBO’s flexible product catalog for managing complex products, intuitive business user tools for merchandising and promotions, flexible and cost effective ways to manage a modern front end, order creation capabilities, native customer and order management to serve the full omnichannel experience, and subscription management to help drive loyalty.

We pride ourselves on being able to handle complex scenarios seamlessly.

Clients can use KIBO to power their customer experiences to drive loyalty and revenue, and only KIBO gives teams a fast and easy way to unlock the customer experience where inventory and order management data matters.

Only KIBO comes with a powerful subscription commerce solution that can be deployed as a standalone or alongside our broader e commerce functionality out of the box. And while KIBO offers a wide set of capabilities, each of these components is completely modular and independently consumable and deployable, so the KIBO’s modern architecture lets you implement only what you need, eliminating vendor lock in and ensuring the solution is future proof. This is where we stand out. Finally, KIBO’s market leading depth of capabilities out of the box, which we only get to see a small sample of today, combined with our unique managed extensibility, makes managing these complex commerce experiences fast and easy.

Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today, taking a very quick flyover of Civo’s robust capabilities through the lens of an omnichannel retailer. There’s a ton more of the platform that we just didn’t have time to cover today, so I encourage you to reach out and set up some time to discuss.

Thanks for your time, and I look forward to connecting soon.