Publicis Sapient Digital Commerce: Offering Summary

Solving Digital Transformation Challenges

To attract customers to your direct-to-consumer (D2C) channel, your offering must meet diverse and ever-increasing customer needs and expectations:

+40% Home Experiences: There is increased demand for at-home entertainment experiences, as well as a need for creative content to elevate these experiences.
80% Budget Pressures: Customers are facing financial pressures due to rising costs of living and are seeking unique ways to save money.
-68% Fast Shipping: Online purchasers are looking for fast shipping with guaranteed quick and easy access to products.
79% Social Media: Consumers say purchasing decisions are increasingly driven by inspiration from peers and content on social media.
96% Sustainability: Customers claim they try to behave sustainably, making it key to engage their sense of social responsibility.
27% Brand Loyalty: Customers report feeling no loyalty to any brand. Personalization is essential to create a connection and build loyalty.

Tailoring Your B2C Commerce Approach

We help you build a unified D2C digital channel that provides a seamless customer experience across all commerce touchpoints and generates measurable business value through incremental digital revenue streams. Indirect benefits include increased brand affinity, data-driven insights, new services, and business flexibility to diversify channels and reduce retailer dependence.

Unlock Indirect Revenue

When businesses offer products directly to consumers, the potential goes beyond direct revenue to include indirect value drivers:

Brand Affinity
- Increase brand advocacy
- Drive sales across channels
- Create brand community
- Accounts for +30-40% of direct revenue
Data-Driven Insights
- Generate consumer insights
- Provide personalized experiences
- Accounts for +70-80% of direct revenue
New Services
- Test and learn approach to launch with less risk
- Increase speed to market
- Accounts for +40-50% of direct revenue

Delivering Exactly What Customers Want

Exceptional B2C commerce experiences can be a key differentiator for your business. We help you build digital commerce solutions that:

Provide buyers with product and application expertise, and easy product comparisons through extensive tagging, metadata, material guides, and comparative visualizations of material properties.
Keep customers informed on competitive pricing and product quality, offering fast access to a flexible estimate calculator and the ability to analyze trade-offs between service level and cost.
Allow customers to speak with someone who can facilitate order changes or sales, embedding user-centricity so customers feel they have a partner invested in their success.
Offer timesaving self-service tools for simple tasks, such as scheduling auto-purchases and making direct purchases in an integrated procurement system.
Enable transparency across product availability, shipping status, and delivery times, requiring a backend that manages expectations based on established rules.
Provide access to product quality guarantees, building trust with payment escrow services, seller certification systems, and seller activity and response ratings.

Create an End-to-End Commerce Ecosystem

We connect both frontstage and backstage capabilities in an end-to-end ecosystem to unlock business and customer value.

Frontstage: Channel experience, customer touchpoints, features, and user interfaces that can make or break a sale.
Backstage: Organizational and operational components, including the operating model, processes, technology, and data.

Five Key Components:

Integrating New Capabilities into Existing Technology:
- Manage technical debt while creating new capabilities.
- Use composable architecture with microservices and APIs to seamlessly integrate new B2C commerce capabilities into your existing technology landscape or third-party marketplaces, and scale them.
Establishing Data Quality and Trust:
- Address complex pipelines and challenges with data findability, accessibility, and interoperability.
- Establish clear data governance early to maximize data value.
Embedding User-Centricity in the Organization:
- Shift from product-centric to customer-centric approaches.
- Deliver client and customer experience solutions that embed a user focus in all activities.
Supporting Change Management:
- Begin with a reset of mindsets and behaviors, taking a human-centered approach to ensure transformation is successful and embraced by employees.
- Informed and aligned teams work together to adopt new capabilities, reducing the risk of transformation failure.
Optimizing and Managing Commerce Operations:
- Help you adopt the skills needed to maximize systems, data, people, and processes.
- Sustain commerce solutions with managed services as needed.

Customers at the Core

We leverage our expertise in customer experience to embed customer-centricity at the heart of B2C commerce solutions, enabling different interactions for new versus returning customers.

Our customer-centric approach allows you to:

Connect the end-to-end user journey and gain visibility into the complete purchasing cycle.
Understand different personas for key customer groups and act on data to ensure their needs are met.
Embed customer and user insights into the delivery process to understand problems, test solutions, and fix issues early.

An End-to-End Approach to B2C Commerce

Frontstage:

Personalization
Searchability
Content
Products
Payments
Orders
Touchpoints
Promotions
Pricing

Backstage:

Assets
Operations
Data
Processes
Marketplace
Platform
Technology
AI and ML
Fulfillment

A Strong Technology Backbone

Our composable architecture includes reusable, channel-agnostic services that can be easily customized and stitched together to serve multiple journeys and enable innovation. This API-driven, component-based, and cloud-hosted architecture significantly reduces build time, downtime, and business disruptions.

Through a headless commerce approach, our architecture allows front-end applications to be decoupled from back-end commerce functionality. This means your business can make updates and edits on the front end without interfering with back-end processes.

Underpinning it all is MACH, the basis for composable and headless commerce. This swappable enterprise tech stack allows every component of a B2C commerce solution to be pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and continuously improved through agile development.

As we implement technology, we focus on speed, value, and quality to ensure incremental, consistent improvement. Minimum viable product (MVP) projects typically take eight weeks. Sprints are defined by feature identification and prioritization to quickly produce an MVP and test it. Features are then incrementally added in a circular design–build–test–learn process. We bring a proven governance and collaborative approach for smooth program execution.

How We’ve Made an Impact

PATRÓN

The Imperative for Change:

Change product reputation and broaden its appeal
Know consumers better to celebrate the product’s craftsmanship and versatility

The Transformative Solution:

Built the spirit industry’s first hyper-personalized cocktail recommendation engine, Cocktail Lab
From any device—phone, tablet, laptop, or voice assistant—visitors to the Patrón Cocktail Lab are asked about their tastes
The Cocktail Lab serves up curated recipes based on personal customer preferences, behavioral insights, local trends, and occasions
Positioned Patrón as a personalized, accessible choice to make the brand top of mind

The Business Impact:

Selling 5x more than its nearest competitor
38% increase in site traffic
109% increase in traffic to cocktail pages
800% increase in cocktail recipes
2 million page views

LOBLAW

The Imperative for Change:

External pressures forced the brand to work faster and systematically to serve their customers for another 100 years

The Transformative Solution:

Built a world-class digital organization
Created an agile roadmap for transformation based on self-sufficiency, trust, and scalability
Applied a continuous improvement approach to all initiatives

The Business Impact:

The digital business transformation set the stage for agile innovation and launching initiatives, including:
- 700 locations added—PC Express online grocery shopping enables customers to buy online and pick up in one store
- Added a new digital pharmacy to allow customers to securely refill prescriptions online

CARREFOUR

The Imperative for Change:

Online platforms were taking share from Carrefour by offering broad choices, competitive pricing, good customer service, and convenient delivery
Rising customer expectations around quality of service and price competitiveness, combined with declining levels of customer loyalty, put pressure on the business
Growing ethical concerns among customers around the quality of food and the fairness and sustainability of the supply chains

The Transformative Solution:

Aligned teams around a forward-looking vision through brainstorming, strategizing, and detailed planning
Created an executable roadmap with buy-in across Carrefour leadership
Co-created a next-generation omnichannel transformation strategy
Carried out the strategy in four streams:
1. Front-end customer experience: creating a unified Carrefour shopping website and a single e-commerce app
2. Logistics and supply chain: covering everything from order management systems, warehouse and transport management, to experience at the pickup points
3. Digital in-store: building solutions that use the same assets as online and start to leverage the potential for true omnichannel
4. Marketing and customer data: creating more comprehensive loyalty or subscription offerings

The Business Impact:

E-commerce sales increased 3.1%
Food e-commerce sales grew more than 30%

What Sets Publicis Sapient Apart?

We have vast experience designing and implementing digital commerce solutions, including omnichannel commerce strategy, commerce experience design, commerce and OMS technology platforms, and commerce optimization and management.

39 of the top 100 online retailers use commerce platforms designed, built, or supported by Publicis Sapient
Over 39% of all North American online retail revenue through a platform were on systems designed, built, or supported by Publicis Sapient
14.7% average increase in revenue from commerce experiences on platforms designed and built by Publicis Sapient

Partnerships

We partner with commerce, technology, and marketing leaders to provide a comprehensive 360 approach. Our partners include:

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Commerce platform trusted by industry-leading brands
Adobe Commerce Cloud: Commerce platform to personalize B2B and B2C experiences
commercetools: Cloud-based headless commerce platform
VTEX: A complete, connected, and composable platform
KIBO: E-commerce platform and service

Why Publicis Sapient

Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation company. We partner with global organizations to help them create and sustain a competitive advantage in a world that is increasingly digital. We operate through our expert SPEED capabilities: Strategy and Consulting, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data. Combined with our culture of curiosity and deep industry knowledge, this enables us to deliver meaningful impact to our clients’ businesses by reimagining the products and experiences their customers truly value. Our agile, data-driven approach equips our clients’ businesses for change, making digital the core of how they think and what they do. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe, with 20,000 people and over 50 offices worldwide. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.

Sources

Campaign, "This winter is the most exciting in recent memory for the brand experience industry," 2021.
Forbes, "How Customer Expectations Have Led To The Rise Of Hyperlocal Fulfillment," 2022.
Nosto, "Shifts in Consumer Shopping Habits: Authenticity, Personalization and the Power of UGC," 2021.
Sustainable Brands, "Driving Consumer Behavior Towards Sustainable Lifestyles: 2020-2021 Socio-Cultural Trend Report on Consumer Sustainability Intentions & Actions," 2021.
Internet Retailing, "More than a quarter of adults no longer feel loyal to any brand: study," 2022.

For more information, visit publicissapient.com/solutions/digital-commerce.