Composable commerce gives Alamy flexibility to reposition and grow
Alamy, a 20-year-old premium stock photography company, transformed its digital commerce business by adopting composable technologies.
Case Alamy
The Challenge
Alamy wanted to reposition itself but was weighed down by a legacy system. Making changes to the homepage was painful and required developers. An inflexible tech stack limited the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) and took a disproportionate amount of time to change.
Imagine running a platform that has more than three million products added to it each month. Alamy is a digital platform that makes it easy for people worldwide to find, license and create content. They have over 100,000 global customers, with 350 million stock photos, vectors and videos from individual and agency contributors.
They identified the need to polish the customer experience, roll out content changes, and unlock new merchandising opportunities to hit their targets. “We recognised the need to reposition ourselves within the market. That included redefining our brand and launching new propositions for the creative market”, Suzie Leckie, Head of Global Product.
Our Solution
Alamy needed an ecommerce solution that would make content changes easier while growing their customer experience and product offering in a scalable and adaptable way. By selecting Contentful – a composable, API-first, cloud-based solution –, Alamy could streamline content creation with a headless CMS and simple UI that enabled merchandising and personalising across the purchase journey.
To create flexibility and capability in product structure and digital sales globally, IONA also introduced commercetools. Alamy sells multiple image licenses for each product type, and its products have different restrictions for use. commercetools handled Alamy’s complex product ecosystem and supported external asset repositories while scaling quickly. “IONA drove a mindset shift – challenging us to simplify and limit the complexity we had built into our products.” – Suzie Leckie, Head of Global Product.
The Results
The solution resulted in a content-rich real estate with new landing pages that attracted over 2.7 million in reach. Alamy can now create advanced personalisation and merchandising opportunities and easily run cohesive marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
Now Alamy can easily polish its user experience thanks to quick experimentation, implementation and testing capabilities. The ability to easily manage pricing updates and create new pricing models has resulted in a 20% uplift in web conversion and a 5% increase in Average Order Value. A 12% uplift in revenue from seamless customer experience has been achieved.
“Our new homepage and landing pages deliver a punch and represent our visual identity. We have personalised content throughout the buying journey with promotional banners driving conversion and upsell [and] further optimised our merchandising performance via A/B Multi Variant testing”, says Suzie.
Alamy is looking towards more pricing experimentation, personalisation and a test-and-learn approach. Suzie believes the new solution has been “truly transformational in what we have been able to offer our customers. Our capabilities now enable us to restructure what we offer and how we take it to market. We can innovate and change in ways that were hard to imagine a short time ago.”
