Alamy
Composable technologies enable repositioning and growth
Alamy, a 20-year-old premium stock photography company, transformed its digital commerce business by adopting composable technologies.
The solution is 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.
The project
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.
Alamy sought to reposition in the market and launch new propositions for the creative market but was weighed down by a legacy system. The saw the need to polish the customer experience, roll out content changes, and unlock new merchandising opportunities to hit their targets.
Working with IONA, Alamy selected Contentful – a composable, API-first, cloud-based solution. With Contentful, they 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”, states Suzie Leckie, Head of Global Product.
Key results
Alamy’s content-rich real estate with new landing pages attracted over 2.7 million in reach. Alamy were now capable of creating advanced personalisation and merchandising opportunities and easily running cohesive marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
Alamy boasted a polished, rapidly evolving 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 was 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 Leckie.
Highlights
- 20% uplift in web conversion
- 12% growth in total revenue
- 5% increase in Average Order Value
- Composable transformation: Replaced a rigid legacy system with a powerful, flexible stack using commercetools and Contentful.
- Marketing agility: Empowered marketing teams to experiment, test and launch new landing pages without developer support.
- Massive content reach: New content-rich landing pages attracted over 2.7 million in reach.
- Mastered product complexity: The new composable platform easily handles Alamy's highly complex ecosystem of 350 million assets and varied licensing models.