Wolverine Pivots to a Mobile-First Approach with Salesforce Commerce Cloud

One of the more tough-looking brands in the clothing industry, Wolverine specializes in sturdy footwear for industry – whether it’s safety-toed boots to durashocks and waterproofs.

It’s also one of the more innovative brands among its peers, taking to mobile at a greater and greater speed as it realizes the shift towards the smaller screen. The D2C brand hosts its ecommerce platform on Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Yet according to Salesforce data, despite the majority of online shopping being done on mobile (52%) the share of mobile order falls to just 30%.

Wolverine, which also owns other big brands like Hush Puppies and Merrell, is a $2.5 billion footwear empire, yet its mobile performance was in line with this disconnect between browsing and buying on mobile.

“We wanted to double down on our efforts to improve the mobile experience,” said Jason Pawloski, Wolverine’s director of direct-to-consumer technology. “As soon as Commerce Cloud integrated Apple Pay into the digital platform, we bought into its value. We felt it was important enough to extend our holiday code freeze to accommodate the rollout of Apple Pay in November, and move the needle on our holiday business.”

Speed

Using one of Salesforce’s cartridges, CyberSource (a payment provider), Wolverine implemented a payment solution that uses Apple Pay, with the aim of elevating mobile conversions.

It first tested the capabilities of Apple Pay connected to SFCC with one of its smaller brands. The relaunch took just 24 hours, and within the span of a week, Wolverine launched Apple Pay across half of its dozen brands.

“We had no unexpected issues,” added Pete Buzzell, its international tech support manager, “and were able to launch the rest of our portfolio of brands within a few days.”

Once it launched Apple Pay across all 12 of its brands, Wolverine witnessed an increase of 19% in its total mobile conversion as well as an increase of 21% in iPhone conversions. Among the brands, some of them saw an increase of 33% in iPhone mobile conversions.

The boost in mobile conversion has been outstanding, with a 74% boost in Wolverine’s mobile traffic coming from iPhone users.

Shortening the checkout

Integrating Apple Pay, Wolverine had a single-touch payment option, helping to lessen the most infamous problem that hampers ecommerce: cart abandonment. And cart abandonment is higher on mobile than on desktop – the small form fields that are painful to the eye; the multiple pages of the checkout process.

Streamlining the checkout process with Apple Pay, Wolverine squeezed it and shortened it by 75% which has in turn helped cart abandonment drop notably. But they didn’t stop there. They had the idea to expand the use of the single-page payment solution beyond the checkout page and incorporate it across its product detail pages.

This makes it easier for shoppers to buy without even visiting the checkout page. “It will be interesting to see the impact when shoppers can skip the checkout altogether,” said Jason. “Mobile is a huge strategic pillar for us, and we’re not done intesting.”

A shared architecture

Across all its 12 brands, this shared architecture and core code base “allows us to scale and leverage resources in a very effective way, keeping tech costs under control and driving costs down as a percentage of revenue,” said Pete.

Linking up with Apple Pay via CyberSource is not the only way in which Wolverine has partnered with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. But it is one of the more important ones. Being part of the Commerce Cloud LINK Technology Partner Program, Wolverine says that it ensures consistency across its brands, its digital experiences, and websites.

“The LINK ecosystem is awesome,” said Pete, “The CyberSource certified cartridge gave us the ability to start with a very solid foundation. The LINK ecosystem makes sure we are in the best possible position to adopt new technologies as fast as possible, because someone else laid the groundwork for us.”

For Wolverine, it has “enabled the team to deliver above-average growth,” added Pete, “record revenues, and engaging consumer experiences across our complex portfolio of global brands… At the same time, we’ve lowered technology costs, improved speed to market, and grown our bottom line.”

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) dev teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.