Improved UX for Seamless Subscription Services
Leveraging best-of-breed headless solutions to create a friction-free customer journey for FilterEasy’s subscription-based model.
Key Partnerships
FilterEasy has a clear mission: make consumer’s lives easier by simplifying the process of selecting and replacing in-home air and water filters. Inherent to that mission is a need for a clear and easy purchasing journey. A growing consumer base and ever-expanding product set motivated FilterEasy to look for better ways to manage their online platform and ensure they could deliver the simplicity and ease their customers expect. With a tight timeline, they turned to Orium’s composable commerce experts to help them build a solution that would meet the needs of their customers and their technical team.
The Challenge
FilterEasy had two overarching goals: to improve overall UX and enable agile evolution of their ecommerce offering over time.
Supporting the customer journey is at the heart of both of these goals, and a key improvement tied to that was simplifying the filter-selection process to move customers through the purchasing funnel more easily. There are plenty of filters in the market today, but without an authoritative list of what filter to use in which circumstance, customers are left confused when it comes time to replace them. Helping consumers navigate this niche knowledge area with confidence was a high-priority part of the work to be done.
But FilterEasy needed more than just a simpler filter-selection process for customers. They also needed a solution that could be managed by their lean technical team and scale with them as they grew. And adding to those pressures, they also had a tight timeline to implement a solution: just 4 months to go-live. The solution had to be the right fit for their platform management needs and be in the market quickly.
Composable commerce provided the perfect option, enabling them to move off of a monolith solution that had most of their code stored in the front-end and onto a modern commerce engine with a flexible, fully customizable headless CMS. This approach would provide FilterEasy with maximum control over content and give room to expand and adapt as the business inevitably grows.
The Strategy
To meet the short timeline, FilterEasy, Orium, and sister agency Gluo started by narrowing down the project scope to the essentials required for launch. By homing in on core components, they built a plan that centered on the core infrastructure changes necessary to enable the FilterEasy team to control content and influence the customer journey.
Design and development work focused on the funnel experience. Keeping the customer top of mind, the objective was to eliminate barriers that prevent a customer moving from consideration to conversion. The team decided to build a simple question flow for customers to identify their filtration needs and provide them the right product and subscription cadence.
Progressive information capturing would eliminate unsuitable products and options narrow until the correct filter was identified, supporting an easier purchasing journey by simplifying the selection process. A subscription-based model would also help support ongoing or repeat purchases, ensuring FilterEasy’s shoppers remain customers for the lifetime of their needs.
Simultaneously, the needs of FilterEasy’s internal team had to be considered. FilterEasy has a lean, hard-working tech team and the back-end had to integrate easily and require minimal ongoing developer involvement for website content updates and product catalog updates. The team selected BigCommerce for its robust capabilities, and leveraged Gluo’s BigCommerce Accelerator to speed time to market with ready-to-go integrations for core features.
Working with Orium made our transition to composable more efficient and more effective. Their team explained options clearly and concisely, so we could move quickly to solutions that would work for our needs.
The Solution
The key feature of the new website is the filter questionnaire, which takes the customer from the top of the funnel to the bottom— product interest to conversion.
As a customer fills in the questionnaire, the system eliminates the products that don’t match their answers and filter narrows options to a final product that will meet their needs and habits. All guesswork for consumers is eliminated, and they can confidently start their subscription knowing it’s the best product for them. The team employed significant UX testing for this feature, ensuring that the quiz funnel would maximize product discovery and personalization.
Gluo’s BigCommerce Accelerator not only enabled the team to quickly and easily integrate BigCommerce’s engine into FilterEasy’s tech stack—which provided the backbone of the experience and the product catalog management capabilities that will empower the team to make their own changes over the long haul—it also provided ready integrations for the other headless commerce solutions FilterEasy was looking for in their new composable architecture.
To create a better content authoring and management experience for the website, an integration with Contentstack’s CMS was implemented, giving the team the low-developer involvement solutions they needed to keep their site content fresh. Vercel was also selected as the hosting platform for the site, supporting a performant, scalable front-end experience. Additionally, FilterEasy can access inventory management and order fulfillment through their existing Netsuite ERP, and manage new product subscriptions through MiniBC’s subscription management system.
As a result of using these composable commerce platforms, the new FilterEasy website is not only better for the team to work with, it enables the ongoing ability to improve UX and test new features that will drive conversions for years to come.
Outcomes & Next Steps
The filtereasy.com site was successfully delivered on time with Gluo’s BigCommerce Accelerator. The new experience is a win-win of the best kind: customers can easily narrow down their options to the product they need and begin their subscriptions, and the FilterEasy team can update content and products to satisfy new consumer demand without a heavy development burden.
The initial site launch focused on a narrowed list of key priorities. With those live, FilterEasy is continuing to work with Gluo as their support partner to enhance the customer experience, building out personalization tooling for conversion optimization and identifying areas for further refinement where possible. Now that they are working with composable commerce, they have the flexibility and room to grow their commerce experiences in an effective and scalable way in 2024 and beyond.
