PUMA leverages the power of Salesforce to relaunch its mobile sites and scale customer expectations.

Following the numerous unique flexible access the smart mobile device boast of, PUMA looked to leverage these benefits and equally scale customer expectations. In the bid to tap into the fast-growing benefits and unique features of mobile, PUMA overhauled and relaunched its mobile websites across twenty-four markets worldwide with the power of Salesforce. According to PUMA's Global Head of Ecommerce - Ken Kralick - “Shoppers may buy from PUMA.com, or they may be in one of our wholesalers or retailers, or just walking down the street and see one of our products,” “they may use their phone to learn about the brand. So we need to focus on the mobile customer experience so they can do that very quickly. You have to balance that with the ability to show a big product catalogue and represent the brand.” It was looking good, there was massive awareness, the mobile traffic in some geographical areas was slightly close to 70%, this figure exceeded Salesforce recent index report that stood at 60% of traffic and 41% for orders. As good as this traffic looks, it doesn't translate to conversions, posed serious challenges to PUMA as they are keen on improvingconversion rate. PUMA then set out to re-architect its sites to enable shoppers to create accounts and save carts for future checkouts be it on the phone, gadget or desktop.

Salesforce Storefront Reference Architecture through its data-driven from different device traffic patterns and experience of shoppers behaviour of 2000 storefronts together with its cutting edge mobile UX design, technical architecture aimed at improving conversions that merchants to build exceptional unique and differentiated sites. As soon as PUMA implemented this reference storefront architecture, that was the start of the customer success story. “We rolled it out as a true reference architecture with multiple countries, multiple currencies, multiple languages and continuous integration, so we can have a solid, future proof, mobile-first platform to build off globally,” said Kralick. The following transformation took place at PUMA after;

• PUMA now easily delivers top-notch mobile-first sites that are ready for any task. PUMA no longer have to worry about the site surviving shopper demand when a hot new product hits, for example, the most recent Fenty X Creeper sneaker collaboration with top talented international artiste- Rihanna hit the market. “We’d get to 18,000 concurrent users in the first couple seconds and it would just devastate all our sites for a couple of minutes. Now, with the new Storefront Reference Architecture, we don’t even notice the spike. It’s a non-event from a server-load standpoint.” Kralick said.
• PUMA is now a trailblazer constantly disrupting the industry with jaw-breaking interruptions. PUMA now have the stamina to initiate experience-enhancing tweaks to its site, consistently iterating based on real consumer behaviour. Take, for example, PUMA remodelled the top navigation and internal search, in line with Salesforce’s advice and best practices. “Without changing any product, without doing any price-point changes, that tweak increased conversion,” said Kralivk, “We’re scalable. We’re releasing improvements more often. We’re testing and able to prove and disprove hypotheses quickly in a way that we couldn’t on other platforms".
• Quick, reliable and immediate response by PUMA while using Salesforce. After the overhaul and relaunch of PUMA’s mobile sites in July 2017, it is now possible for PUMA to render and fully load 35% and 69% faster respectively, which result in image load times of less than two seconds on the product detail page. There is a significant improvement in the Conversion rate from less than 1% to nearly 1.5%. According to Kralick, “The fact that it’s faster and helps us sell more and we can get to market faster — and that Salesforce has truly as an organization partnered with us —, I can’t tell you how important that is.” In re-engineering its sites around mobile, PUMA is now truly living by its tagline, “Forever Faster.”