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E-commerce

Direct-to-Consumer Storefront

A client leaving revenue on the table through third-party resellers — rebuilt as a direct-to-consumer storefront on Sitecore Order Cloud.

Industry
E-commerce
Role
UX Designer
Timeline
16 months
The challenge

Selling through everyone except themselves.

The client sold their natural gas products online almost entirely through third parties, which meant giving up margin on every sale instead of selling directly to the customers who wanted their product.

Every bit of online sales ran through third parties — not most of it, all of it. The client wanted a way to avoid the fees that came with that arrangement and start capturing that revenue directly.

Discover

Understand rules that don't apply to typical e-commerce.

Natural gas isn't a typical e-commerce product — pricing, regulation, and fulfillment all follow industry-specific rules that a standard storefront template couldn't account for.

Understanding those rules meant working across the business — Admins, Finance, Fulfillment, Membership, Sales, Communications, and IT all had a piece of how this product actually needed to work.

Define

Decide what a standard platform couldn't do out of the box.

Building on Sitecore Order Cloud meant defining exactly where the platform's defaults broke down against this client's actual business rules, and where custom logic was non-negotiable.

Finance and Sales drove the most significant customizations. On the technical side, the platform had to integrate cleanly with third-party solutions for fulfillment, payment, and customer service — none of it built in isolation.

Design

A storefront built to sell direct, not just list products.

The resulting storefront let the client sell directly to customers for the first time — turning a channel they'd been giving away to third parties into direct revenue.

Working from an existing style guide, I designed the entire end-to-end sales process — product descriptions, cart, checkout, and receipts — as one continuous flow rather than a set of disconnected screens.

Test

Validated before the client's first direct sale.

Testing ran with subject-matter experts from the business, walking through the full path end to end — product selection through checkout confirmation — before any of it went live.

The results

What changed once it shipped.

Direct sales
Client can now sell directly to customers instead of only through third parties
New revenue channel
Increased revenue by capturing margin previously lost to resellers
Industry-specific
Built around this client's actual business and industry rules, not a generic template

[Add a number here if you have one — revenue increase, order volume, margin improvement.]

Deliverables
E-commerce platform Sitecore Order Cloud implementation Custom business logic
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