Powering Change with Composable Commerce

Like many brands with a history of early digital success, iFIT was facing challenges with their existing commerce platform. The all-in-one system was limiting their ability to enhance user experiences and scale efficiently. As their business had grown and expanded to new territories and business models, they needed an architecture that could adapt and grow with them and the multiple brands and experiences they operate.

iFIT’s primary goal was to migrate their NordicTrack brand from their existing platform to a modern, headless commerce platform, which would help them establish a scalable, multi-brand and multi-country architecture that could offer enhanced user experiences and drive customer acquisition. With an active member community turning to NordicTrack every day as part of their health and wellness journey, ensuring a smooth transition that didn’t disrupt the current user experience was paramount.

The decision was made to take an incremental approach to rolling out their new composable stack, starting with the Canadian site experience for their iconic NordicTrack brand, which would allow iFIT to see early ROI and make any necessary adjustments before a full-scale rollout across all their properties.

To understand the challenges they were facing and ensure they got the right architecture and solutions, Orium worked closely with iFIT leadership to identify the requirements and business use cases that would determine the scope of the initial NordicTrack Canada release. Orium started with our composable commerce foundations—a six-week Discover and Define program to determine a business’s core needs and solutions—to build out the Commerce Layer composable accelerator. This phase included developing a dynamic product model that accounted for NordicTrack’s complex products and customization needs. The focus was on creating dynamic and rich Product Detail Pages (PDPs) that supported the brand’s storytelling and effectively marketed large equipment and iFIT subscriptions.

With the Commerce Layer accelerator in place, the team set to work. The development phase included six sprints, followed by user acceptance testing (UAT) and the final launch. With Commerce Layer as the commerce engine, NordicTrack’s new tech stack featured Contentstack as the CMS and Algolia for search, with additional integrations for Stripe and Klarna for payments, AWS for synchronization, and Google Analytics for tracking and analysis.

One of the key needs for the team was the ability to accommodate the complex offerings of their NordicTrack product line. Orium developed a dynamic product model which would enable users to customize their equipment and purchases with the variety of options available, including subscription memberships, warranties, and even delivery methods for their new equipment.

The team also created engaging Product Detail Pages (PDPs) to support the brand’s storytelling and effectively market both their NordicTrack equipment and iFit subscriptions. Powered by their new CMS, Contentstack, the PDPs are treated as immersive opportunities for merchandising, with high-quality imagery and video content and a layout that makes each item feel more like a unique landing page than a perfunctory production information pitstop. Only the basics—price and product name—live in the commerce engine.

With the growth of their interactive subscription-based platform and a rich-media driven product experience, turning to Contentstack for CMS also meant that iFIT gained better control over their digital asset management needs. With the new CMS, they now have the content flexibility and control they needed for expansion of product lines and a rollout across any of iFIT’s brands into new markets down the line.

Large fitness equipment purchases are meaningful investments for customers, which means they seek out more information and tend to have more touchpoints and interactions before purchase. Knowing this, Orium implemented an Algolia integration on the Product Landing Page (PLP) to enhance the customer journey. With a built-in comparison tool, they can now provide customers with the detailed analysis they want, educating customers on what makes the NordicTrack products unique and worth investing in.

Ultimately, their new composable architecture gave them the ability to sync data between their commerce layer and their content to enable a truly immersive, brand-driven experience.

The new nordictrack.ca site launched with an enhanced user experience and streamlined customer journey. It also set the stage for the future, establishing a scalable architecture for multi-brand and multi-country expansions as the iFIT brands continue to grow. Leveraging and expanding the foundation from the .ca site, Orium and iFIT were able to launch the NordicTrack.com site in less than four months. Though they initially launched with a split test, results were immediately stronger on the new site experience and the iFIT team elected to end the split test early to drive 100% of traffic to the new experience as soon as possible.

As they look to the future, iFIT will be able to focus on further integrating and enhancing composable solutions as they move towards a fully composable solution across all of their properties to support business growth and evolving customer needs. By embracing a composable commerce architecture for their NordicTrack brand, iFIT has set a new standard for digital experiences in the fitness industry. This approach not only enhances the user experience but also provides a scalable and adaptable platform for future growth and innovation.