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CASE STUDY German beauty firm Cosnova creates “headless” ecommerce environment allowing greater experimentation with CX

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Gaining the ability to experiment with front-end customer experiences is increasingly vital to etailers – and German beauty giant Cosnova is doing just that with a radical shake up of how it runs its ecommerce technology.

A beauty and cosmetics brand operating globally and based in Sulzbach, near Frankfurt, Cosnova has three major brands – Lov, Catrice and Essence – the latter being the highest selling cosmetics monobrand worldwide. 

To create what it dubs ‘a headless commerce environment’, the retailer has partnered with a number of tech companies to create an interesting approach to running cross-channel ecommerce.

By leveraging  Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to separate critical backend systems from the fast moving world of front-end digital experiences, Cosnova is delivering on a long-promised vision for ecommerce: Rapidly build personalized front-end customer experiences, increase agility, gain the freedom to experiment, easily call on commerce and content functionality across any touchpoint, and scale more efficiently using the headless approach. 

To do this it has worked with  Mobify as its front-end, with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Amplience Dynamic Content and WUNDER for customer engagement on the backend, along with other best-in-breed solutions.

“We wanted a complete headless environment to make it easier to add and change our customer-facing digital experiences across brands without disrupting backend systems or the overall architecture,” explains Cosnova Chief Digital Officer Dirk Lauber. “Mobify helped us in two important ways. First, we wanted to avoid the challenge of building front-end experiences from scratch. Mobify is a mature platform that can help us create high performing and flexible front-end experiences, such as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), that we can evolve for each brand and different markets. Second, we wanted an open presentation layer that could help unify our entire architecture. This enabled us to use our best-of-breed ecommerce, CMS and personalization solutions and turn our focus to creating, testing and optimizing front-end solutions that are critical to winning over customers.”

The Cosnova headless commerce approach represents a new generation in headless architecture and a new trend in B2C digital technology, because, although headless architectures is not new, few companies have implemented this approach to leverage an agile front-end that’s completely independent of any of the backend business logic and integrated using APIs, considered the transformative building blocks of modern digital business.

What is interesting is how Cosnova’s decoupled Mobify front-end has everything the company needs to build and experiment with proven front-end solutions such as PWAs for mobile, tablet and desktop, as well as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), native apps, and future touchpoints as they emerge.

Pairing Mobify with Amplience’s API-first headless CMS solution separates the company’s content from the presentation. This enables much higher content reuse, dynamic rendering and personalization across sites, apps, voice interfaces, in-store displays, etc.

Add innovative solutions such as WUNDER for AI-based personalization, then run back-end experiments without disrupting front-end functions.

“Cosnova is transforming its business with a modern ecosystem that truly moves at the speed of consumer technology and their ever-evolving demands,” says Mobify CEO Igor Faletski. “Ultimately, the shopper will be able to purchase any product across any brand or partner touchpoint and receive the same incredible personalized shopping journey and service. In the short term, having a PWA capable of improving the customer experience quickly will generate more conversions and engagement. It’s amazing to see the Cosnova and its technology partners working together to accelerate this customer-first, results-driven digital transformation.”

James Brooke, Amplience founder and CEO, adds: “With its headless, API-first approach, Cosnova is creating a powerful customer experience platform that will allow rapid creation of multi-touchpoint personalized customer journeys. We look forward to supporting Cosnova in elevating their brand storytelling to deliver deeper and more valuable customer relationships.”

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