Case Study

As the leading landscape supply company in North America, SiteOne had two primary concerns: they needed to modernize across several legacy platforms and, at the same, integrate a growing list of newly acquired brands into a cohesive whole. With a recent average of more than one acquisition a month, they were facing an increasingly untenable range of technology standards across the organization.

SiteOne needed to enable their organization to move faster and collaborate effectively across business units so they could make changes and enhance experiences at the pace the market and their consumers demand. But they had to strike a careful balance. They couldn’t make choices that would introduce too much risk: of either the technology failing to meet their needs, or of their teams not adopting the technology within the organization.

A composable commerce approach was the obvious solution to their challenges, enabling them to select the best tools available for their unique needs. Recognizing the scope of such an undertaking, SiteOne worked with Orium to build out a plan for replatforming.

SiteOne had a strong vision of what they wanted to achieve, and therefore what they needed from an updated commerce experience. They knew a composable architecture offered the flexibility they needed today and the scalability to sustain their dynamic operations into the future.

To help SiteOne plot the course for success, Orium adopted a phased approach for modernizing their site experiences that started with Canada and could then be replicated quickly and easily across brands and markets. Not only would SiteOne launch in Canada before rolling the replatformed experience out across additional brands and regions, but the replatform itself would be accomplished in phases, enabling SiteOne to see the impact of the replatform in real time.

With so many moving parts needing to be assessed and eventually incorporated into the whole, Orium started by creating a lightweight proof-of-concept that would showcase how their new composable platform would enable the brand management for multiple brands they needed while still allowing for a high degree of customization. The aim was to enable SiteOne to evaluate the options at hand, ensuring they could launch with the right tools for the specific needs they had within their fast-growing organization.

The proof-of-concept (POC) would give SiteOne stakeholders a sightline into what was possible, and then provide the base to build from to speed up time-to-first-value and deliver a relaunched, replatformed composable commerce site experience faster.

The initial POC created an opportunity to showcase many of the possibilities that open up with a replatform to composable commerce. Orium was able to demonstrate things like contractor-specific pricing and other custom features SiteOne was interested in building. With a successful POC that gave a clear sightline in what a future on a composable commerce stack could be and the foundations for success, SiteOne was able to work with Orium to move into the second phase and the transition to composable commerce.

In phase 2, Orium took the commercetools-based POC website and continued to develop features and integrations to fully launch an MVP version of the site. On top of the pre-integrated implementations with Orium’s commercetools Accelerator, the team built out integrations for payment, taxes, product information management (PIM), and order management (OMS). With a replatform to composable commerce, SiteOne was able to select the vendor solutions that were best for their brand and needs.

For example, tax integration is an extremely important consideration when working across borders, and SiteOne operates in both the US and Canada which means not only are there federal tax differences, but variations from state to state and province to province that need to be accounted for. Vertex was able to provide the tax management program SiteOne needed to seamlessly serve customers from every region in North America.

Hand-in-hand with regionally specific tax concerns are considerations around shipping methods, which connect directly to product and order management. To ensure customers get the products they want without hassle, Orium created a seamlessly integrated tech stack that connected everything from content delivery to product delivery into a holistic commerce experience.

Currently in phase 3, Orium and SiteOne teams are continuing to work together closely to iterate on the overall customer experience and implement additional functionalities across SiteOne’s brands in North America.

The new SiteOne.ca built on a composable commerce architecture launched at the end of June 2023 and has already delivered significant operational improvements for SiteOne.

The replatform has empowered their marketing team with a CMS that gives them autonomy over campaigns, content, and messaging without relying on IT. And with the new composable platform, the SiteOne development team is now able to add features and make fixes seamlessly and quickly— what used to take 1-2 weeks can now be accomplished in just 12 hours.

With the base .ca site launched, Orium and SiteOne are working together to develop the next brand built on the commercetools setup. It’s a process that can be repeated as many times as SiteOne needs with their expanding book of brands, and because Orium trained and integrated with SiteOne’s in-house development team during the initial replatform, their internal team is now primed for co-delivery on these new sites into the future.

As the team begins to build out the site experience for more brands and regions, additional business improvement features are being explored. With their modern core, SiteOne can easily integrate new MACH tooling — instead of labor-intensive custom builds — for all net new needs and improvements.