Launching a headless eCommerce solution to achieve brand unity in the home appliances space.
As part of a new rebranding strategy, Cosori needed to improve its eCommerce presence and unify all of its brands into a single tech stack. To enable a seamless online shopping experience for Cosori and its partner brands’ products, Codal migrated the business from a traditional, monolithic eCommerce platform to a more flexible and scalable headless architecture.
Cosori offers a wide range of sophisticated home cooking essentials, such as toasters, food dehydrators, kettles, indoor grills, ovens, and—most famously—air fryers. Designed with simplicity and practicality in mind, Cosori’s product offerings seek to help people make their daily lives easier. There are two other home-appliance brands operating under Cosori: Levoit, which specializes in air purifiers, humidifiers, and vacuums, and Etekcity, which specializes in scales, thermometers, smart lights, and personal health monitors. These American brands have an international presence, selling products to customers online in the UK, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Cosori came to Codal in need of an eCommerce transformation.
To boost customer engagement, conversions, and sales, Cosori—along with its subsidiary brands, Levoit and Etekcity—required a more modern UX and UI design for its DTC online store. And rather than presenting each brand as three separate entities, Cosori, Levoit, and Etekcity were to be unified via a consistent look and feel across each website.
Internally, the business needed a streamlined system for managing, updating, and tracking the performance of each site, so that they could scale and expand to new markets more efficiently.
With many years of experience designing, developing, testing, launching, and maintaining international online stores, Codal was the perfect partner to help Cosori modernize its front- and back-end eCommerce systems, and equip its three brands for long-term success in the highly-competitive home appliances market.
Codal began with a multi-week Discovery process, where we learned the ins and outs of Cosori, Levoit, and Etekcity. This required gaining a thorough understanding of each brand’s various customer personas, direct and in-direct competitors, and surrounding market.
We also dove deep into the underlying technological infrastructure, analyzing the tools and processes that were powering each storefront. Right away, we discovered bottlenecks in the system that were inhibiting an efficient deployment of new site pages and content.
In addition to establishing an intelligent, unified shopping and checkout experience across each of the three storefronts, each brand needed the ability to add specific content, features, and functionality—based on the unique wants and needs of their customers.
However, Cosori’s monolithic eCommerce architecture made it nearly impossible to update the front-end experience, without requiring significant coding work from back-end developers. This led to overly complex workflows, followed by slow deployment times, and ultimately ineffective eCommerce sales and marketing efforts on the front end.
Codal’s solution to this problem was migrating Cosori to a headless approach, which meant decoupling the front and back end, so that each site could be managed and scaled independently, while remaining connected to a single eCommerce engine. With headless, the front- and back-end services of an online store—or in this case, multiple online stores—are not contained within a single code base, and instead communicate with each other via APIs.
As a result, the customer experiences for Cosori, Levoit, and Etekcity could be customized—based on their own sales and marketing initiatives—in the fastest and most efficient way possible. This would become an invaluable transformation as the brands adopted new digital channels, expanded to new territories, and leveraged new site features and functionality.
After reaching the conclusion that adopting a headless architecture was the right step forward, the Codal team got to work.
First, we needed to migrate Cosori and its subsidiary brands to a more robust eCommerce platform—one that supports headless solutions. Shopify Plus—a leading technology provider in the eCommerce space, and one of Codal’s trusted partners—was the best fit, given its intelligent core functionality and diverse set of plug-ins and widgets.
Our team spent the next few weeks migrating Cosori’s data over to Shopify, and building out integrations between the platform and the business’ mission-critical applications. Among these integrations was a new content management system (CMS), Builder.io.
After evaluating several headless CMSs, we decided to go with Builder.io, since it provides a fast and intuitive system for creating, deploying, and updating custom pages. Also, the CMS integrates seamlessly with Shopify Plus.
Once we had established a more flexible, scalable eCommerce infrastructure, our team began optimizing specific elements of the Cosori, Levoit, and Etekcity storefronts—with the aim of creating a unified brand experience and increasing customer engagement, conversions, and sales.
Codal worked closely with Cosori’s in-house design team to establish a set of branding guidelines to inform current and future site pages. Then, based on those guidelines, we designed an intuitive, responsive, and SEO-friendly UX and UI for each brand’s site—complete with streamlined navigation, advanced product search and filtering capabilities, superior product detail pages (PDPs), and a convenient checkout process. When designing and developing each of these site elements, our team relied on data from user behavior and competitive analysis, along with insights and feedback from Cosori’s stakeholders.
Codal’s partnership with Cosori has enabled a cutting-edge eCommerce experience, supported by an intelligent ecosystem of modern tools and workflows.
Through data-driven UX and UI design, this family of home appliance brands is equipped to succeed in the ever-evolving online selling space. And if Cosori decides to take on more subsidiaries in the future, they’ll be able to integrate seamlessly, given the business’ new headless architecture, as well as its updated branding guidelines and page templates.
We’re incredibly proud of the eCommerce transformation that our team planned and executed for Cosori. Codal’s technical insights and solutions have helped the company elevate its digital presence, drive internal efficiencies, and sell more of its innovative home appliance products to customers around the world.
