Unifying multiple websites into one e-commerce engine.

How Marc Fisher Footwear used Adobe Commerce to integrate disparate brand sites into one mother ship.

Established

2005

Greenwich, CT

www.marcfisherfootwear.com

24%

Increase in conversion rate

Products:

Adobe Commerce ›

Objectives

Unify numerous footwear brands onto a centralized e-commerce platform

Create smoother user experience, with responsive videos, calls to action, and product quick-views

Track user activity and manage order attribution to provide visibility into customers’ shopping patterns

Results

24% increase in conversion rate

10% increase in revenue

70% reduction in front-end update time

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Multiple platforms are so last season

Established in 2005, Marc Fisher Footwear is a respected designer and marketer of fashion footwear. In 2017, the New York–based firm — which already listed Guess, Tommy Hilfiger, and Kendall + Kylie among the brands in their portfolio — purchased the footwear brand Easy Spirit from Nine West. Lee Bissonnette, vice president of e-commerce and digital performance marketing at Marc Fisher Footwear, quickly migrated Easy Spirit from their Demandware platform onto Adobe Commerce, reversing the brand’s fortunes. Then, in 2018, when Marc Fisher Footwear took control of Nine West itself, they decided to unify their numerous footwear brands onto one, centralized e-commerce platform.

The Easy Spirit migration to Adobe Commerce was already a success. Lee wanted to further capitalize on the benefits of the multi-tenant Adobe Commerce solution to house three different web stores: Easy Spirit, Nine West, and Marc Fisher Footwear. All three stores needed their own visual identity but would run on one dynamic e-commerce platform.

“We met Lee Bissonnette in 2017,” says Andrew Potkewitz, director of client success at Mediaspa, Marc Fisher Footwear’s solution partner. “After the Easy Spirit project, he asked us to begin migrating the Marc Fisher Footwear website and the newly acquired Nine West website to create operational leverage and to do more with automation, all on one platform, with one team. When we first met, Lee said, ‘Let’s architect something that will scale for multiple brands.’” Mediaspa recommended Adobe Commerce. They could run all three stores using the same instance with just “one back to pat,” says Andrew. This would save time, money, and resources. And next time they acquired a brand, rolling it into the platform would be fast and easy. “Let’s create a mother ship of sites,” he added.

“When we custom develop one feature, all the other brands get it too. That goes for features, extensions, the partner network, and the extension marketplace.”

Andrew Potkewitz

Director of Client Success at Mediaspa, Solution Partner for Marc Fisher Footwear

Three e-commerce sites — one back end

Marc Fisher Footwear was already on Adobe Commerce, so the migration was not as challenging as moving Nine West from Demandware. It took just six weeks to migrate the store to their existing Adobe Commerce multi-tenant cloud instance — the same one they built for Easy Spirit. They integrated their Proprietary ERP and Warehouse systems, and, as the latest version of Adobe Commerce has so many features out of the box, they needed fewer extensions. They did take advantage of TurnTo, Signifyd, Zendesk, and Avalara.

"Utilizing the skills of Media Spa to add substantial capabilities to third-party plug-ins, as well as supported core items such as BlueFoot for CMS, was a game-changer," says Andrew. “We easily created a distinct brand look for each site, because Nine West, Easy Spirit, and Marc Fisher Footwear all have unique brand identities.” However, they all shared the cool features offered in Adobe Commerce. This included a pre-ordering functionality that delivers future shipping date notification.

Adobe Commerce helped to create a smoother user experience, with responsive videos, calls to action, and product quick-views with customizable color swatches. Meanwhile, the Google Tag Manager configuration enables Google Analytics and over 40 digital marketing properties to track user activity and manage order attribution based on 30 triggered events, and more than 60 variables. Centralizing all this data in Adobe Commerce gives Marc Fisher Footwear total visibility into their customers’ shopping patterns. “MBI is another big piece,” said Andrew. “They have some great dashboards. They export that data and offer personalized experiences without having to spend a lot of money.”

Meanwhile, having a cloud-based platform allows Marc Fisher Footwear to scale at peak traffic times, especially useful during sale periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It also means fewer vendors to deal with. Because their business is built on strong preorder events, newsletter and new-product alerts can send thousands of customers flooding to the site. With the cloud, Marc Fisher Footwear is prepared for demand spikes. And with Adobe Commerce, they can keep track of valuable customer data.

From both a development and an admin perspective, Adobe Commerce is easier to manage. Before, the company had to manage three separate sites with three separate admins. The new site allows them to combine these three sites into one. They can also spin up subsequent sites in less than two months. Marc Fisher Footwear boasts a unified admin and unified data too, and when there’s a single patch to be added, it’s applied once and works everywhere. “This is a huge cost saving over the original three-platform solution,” says Andrew.

Nine West: An amazing digital commerce experience

The new Nine West online user experience is optimized for the changing needs of the customer, with a much smoother checkout flow and a custom preorder functionality that includes notification of future shipping dates.

One of the most interesting custom-built features of the new site is order cancellation. On most other fashion e-commerce stores, the sale is final. On Nine West, the customer can cancel their order via the front end during a “remorse window” of one hour. With 90 percent of all cancellations made in the first hour, offering a self-service cancellation feature reduced the number of customer service calls. “That time saving was significant,” said Andrew. “And the easier the return process the more they’ll buy.”

Overall, the Nine West store enjoyed a 10 percent lift in conversion, while cutting 70 percent off the time it takes to update the front end. The upgrade also scored Nine West a nomination for Best Digital Commerce Experience at the 2019 Imagine Excellence Awards.

A step in the right direction

Launched in July 2018, the new Adobe Commerce site is a more flexible, robust, scalable, and stable e-commerce solution for Marc Fisher Footwear. By virtue of expanding the store’s preorder capability, the brand can add more products to the site, and by building a robust multi-warehouse add-on to Adobe Commerce, they now can also handle drop-shipping, opening up a brand-new business model. Marc Fisher Footwear just launched a range of handbags that are fulfilled from a different warehouse and are looking to add even more new product lines in the future.

With fewer cooks in the kitchen, running the e-commerce operation is faster and easier than ever. “When we custom-develop one feature, all the other brands get it too,” says Andrew. “That goes for features, extensions, the partner network, and the extension marketplace.”