Prada Group continues to elevate its customer experience

Prada Group elevates the shopping experience

A slow check-out experience on any retailer's website could turn away shoppers. For Prada Group, a luxury fashion company, an exceptional shopping experience is a core brand value. The company deployed a blazing fast check-out experience—60% faster than the previous one. Shoppers could effortlessly navigate through dozens of bags, shoes, and accessories without annoying page slowdowns. The result? 15% more shoppers are completing their check-outs.

The website was not the only thing that was fast. Prada Group brought the experience to market in just a few months without interrupting business operations. All of this was made possible by a cutting-edge platform designed to adapt to the rapidly evolving commerce landscape. And Accenture was right there with them to design, build, and roll out the platform to Prada Group’s markets and brands.

A composable, nimble platform

Previously, Prada Group operated a monolithic system—in other words, a single, large system that handled all commerce capabilities. Because updates required extensive customization, it could take more than a year to bring new capabilities to market.

The team deployed a composable commerce platform. This means that the platform is composed of modular software components that can be optimized, scaled, or replaced independently—without disrupting the entire platform.

This approach allows Prada Group to assemble a deliberate set of best-in-class commerce capabilities from different vendors and provide the special, luxurious experiences its customers expect. Already, the team has worked with leading vendors like SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe and emerging players like Fluent Commerce, Akeneo, and Algolia. As new channels and disruptive technologies mature, the company is ready to seamlessly integrate them into the platform.

The platform provides better visibility of inventory across stores and warehouses. Prada Group has leveraged that visibility to maximize availability of products to its online and in-store customers. In just a few months, the team installed modules to support cross-channel purchasing options. For example, online orders picked up at stores are fully integrated with store payment options for a seamless customer experience. The payoff? Cross-channel purchases have increased by over 50%.

Progressive deployment brings early benefits

Companies unwilling to make the bigger initial investment in composable commerce platform continue to deploy monolithic systems. They pay the price in other ways. These old systems do not yield business benefits until fully deployed—a risky proposition that can take years. In contrast, the phased rollout of Prada Group’s composable platform allowed the company to reap the benefits much earlier. Each quarter, the team launched components, markets, and brands.

For example, halfway through the project, the team deployed tools that enabled the company’s commerce team to update product information on the website in just a few hours. Previously, this required a complex, manual process that took days.

The incremental deployment facilitated a 15% increase in online revenue. This is a remarkable achievement considering that commerce platform transformations typically disrupt business and constrain growth.

Components were recently deployed to improve personalized search results and product recommendations. The next step is to increase Prada’s knowledge of its customers through enhanced data and analytics. This will enable the company to further personalize the experience. Also in the works are modules to support AI-powered, real-time customer interactions.