Designing and building full stack ecommerce to scale sales globally

Having your webstore as the primary global sales channel makes all requirements and needs for the webstore business critical. Oura, as a pure-play ecommerce company with 10x growth targets, needed a web presence that could deliver on business needs and scale along with their revenue targets.

Key objectives

When we started, Oura was not pleased with their existing webstore. Their website, webstore and other online resources were separate entities, which was not optimal from an internal or customer experience perspective. In addition, the webstore was slow and not technically capable of handling the scaling targets.

The most critical guiding objectives for the new Ouraring.com were:

• More revenue: Enable Oura to grow digital sales significantly on a 10x scale.
• Premium customer experience: Create an amazing and seamless customer experience that conveys Oura’s premium brand, the quality of the product and its design.
• Scalable tech to accommodate growth: Build a webstore with a scalable architecture that can handle 10x growth in the backend without slowing down and also enables the automation of Oura’s internal processes.
• Global sales: Consider international target markets from the start; every aspect of Oura’s ecommerce has to foster global growth.
  
  

Our approach

Business. We started by understanding the business goals for the new web presence. What’s the impact on business, and how will we achieve this? How should improve internal processes? Does investing in a new webstore make sense in the first place?

Design. We started the design phase by understanding who Oura’s customers are, how they buy and what are the main pain points they face on their buyer’s journey. Key challenges were how to communicate a unique product and value proposition and how to make a complicated ordering process seem simple for the customer. We iterated many times, but in the end, it was a combination of web design and email flow design that helped to solve these challenges and nurture visitors into happy customers.

Tech. Only after we had the business objectives solved did we focus on tech: Combining the requirements from above with an understanding of the issues with the existing setup allowed us to clarify what we actually needed to achieve from a technical perspective.

Building a fully integrated ecommerce solution for global ecommerce is complicated: products are sold globally, warehouses are located in multiple countries while manufacturing happens in Finland. This adds a level of technical complexity: logistics and manufacturing integrations, multi-currency support with country-specific tax rules combined with a unique ordering process and order management.

The chosen tech stack was WordPress, Woocommerce and AWS in the core, with plenty of customisation and integrations to accommodate the needs of global full-stack ecommerce. Additionally, Google Analytics, GTM and Google Optimize were set up to enable instant A/B testing and growth hacking activities.

Impact

We launched the new ouraring.com site well in advance for autumn’s significant retail sprees like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas. Right after launching the new webstore, we’ve seen an increase in both traffic and conversion rate. Importantly, Oura can now easily update the site, create landing pages and run A/B tests on their own without requiring technical help with this setup.

Impact in numbers

Already an 80% increase in the conversion rate month-to-month and counting, while simultaneously, the website’s traffic has increased by over 30% (results from significant media attention have been excluded from the data).