Adapting to evolving customer expectations has always fueled growth at GE Appliances.
In 2019, this consumer appliance brand saw the potential of their direct-to-consumer web channel for driving revenue and invested accordingly.
To execute on customer preferences uncovered in market research, they knew they needed to publish and edit store content much faster.
Further, they needed to sync similar store content across four strategic areas of opportunity —including Café Appliances, Haier Appliances, their Air & Water Division, and Smart HQ Solutions.
To do this, the web team needed more precise control over their site. As the team found, making quick, on-brand design changes wasn’t always easy with their static HTML-driven site—let alone rolling out changes across other sites.
To implement the UX team’s creative vision, GE Appliances outsourced site changes to developers. Every change required lots of custom code.
Total reliance on developers for store changes meant slower time to market, barriers to experiment for conversion optimization, and required a sizable budget, says Senior UX Web Designer Phil Back:
“We’d work with a variety of global developers, and timelines were challenging. Any update we wanted to make to the site required cycling through a team of developers, which was a very slow process.”
It would be weeks until the web team’s designs would go live to impact revenue.
As GE Appliances meaningfully scaled its DTC channel, they needed a professional-grade builder and a different native ecommerce platform to enable more efficient content creation and multi-brand management.
To meet their needs, they eventually turned to Shogun’s Advanced plan and saw incredible success.
To expand their DTC presence, the GE Appliances team originally planned to migrate from their static HTML-driven site to BigCommerce and pair with Drupal for CMS needs.
This was the gold-plated solution they initially thought would afford them more control over their ecommerce experience.
But, ahead of going this route, the UX design team installed Shogun to see if it could meet their interim needs first.
While Shogun was only ever intended to be a temporary solution, the team soon realized it was precisely the tool that could scale with them.
The team first used Shogun’s drag-and-drop functionality along with pre-built page templates, block library, reusable ‘snippets’ of content, and unique page elements to ship better pages faster—all without code.
The GE Appliances profile page is a great example of what the team could now do with Shogun:
“When we started the GE Appliances profile rebrand and were creating those design styles, Shogun was super important for me as a designer to bring this all to life,” says Phil.
Using the visual builder, the UX design team could finally push past standard BigCommerce themes and optimize campaign performance.
For example, the team partnered with their SEO agency to build a Black Friday sale landing page—a first of its kind for the brand:
During the days leading up to the timely sale, the team iterated on the promotion as needed, achieved a top SERP ranking on Google, and gained a reusable, custom template for future campaigns.
No more reinventing the wheel per promotion. As Amy Goforth, Senior Manager of UX at GE Appliances, shares:
“Having control and direct access to our pages—instead of going through developers—is everything for our team. We’re applying the framework used for our Black Friday campaign to other sites now. We can create custom campaign pages faster now with Shogun, which has been a huge, huge win for us.”
As the team continued slashing developer timelines and outsourced costs—it was clear they’d found a builder they weren’t growing out of.
“Eventually, our original approach was multi-layered, but there was a big pivot from, ‘We’re just using [Shogun] to get by,’ to ‘We’re going to see how far we can stretch this tool.’ It’s been really fun evolving with Shogun over the last few years.” — Amy Goforth, Senior Manager of UX Design, GE Appliances
No more designing in Photoshop and sending files to be developed—they could build and ship within Shogun, maximizing efficiency and output.
What used to take days or weeks now takes the team just hours to build.
The GE Appliances team can now experiment with designs for conversion optimization (something that was totally off the table before) and launch faster with Shogun’s no-code visual builder. Such is the case with pages like these:
Content syncing on the Advanced plan allows the team to update site content across multiple BigCommerce stores in just a few clicks, like so:
Meaning updates to content styling for product pages, collection pages, custom elements, and more can be easily applied or reused across sub-brands.
Similarly, with Global Snippets, the team can quickly bulk-update product value props, store policies, and social proof that appears as repeat content throughout their stores.
For example, if the team wants to reuse a repeated content block across stores, they can hover over the section in the editor, click “Create Snippet,” and enable Global Snippet functionality.
This means that changes to this content will reflect everywhere the content currently appears.
Global Snippets not only improves speed to market for promotions but by seeing their reuse at a glance, the team can better understand consistency between sub-brand sites and how they might want to differentiate or keep sections the same.
Thanks to Shogun, each site GE Appliances maintains its own unique style yet remains consistent with the brand’s intelligent, trustworthy, and innovative umbrella look.
With content syncing between stores and Global Snippets, the team can work smarter, not harder!
With Shogun, GE Appliances has gained more flexibility, faster speed-to-market, and can optimize their pages quickly.
GE Appliances has built over 500 custom pages with Shogun and has plans to scale to using it for even more of their brand sites in 2023.
What’s more, the team has built 260 custom, reusable ‘snippets’ for more efficient creation and powers six brands with just five different page templates they created custom in the builder.
“The ability to reuse content in Shogun has made our design process streamlined,” says Amber Glisson, Principal UX Strategist. “We can build large amounts of content easily and incredibly quickly across our brands.”
“Previously, we might have spent a few days to a week on a project—depending on the size—and the handoff to the developer team would be two or three days, plus another week,” says Phil.
Today, thanks to Shogun, GE Appliances has:
Ultimately, Shogun enables GE Appliances to put their best creative foot forward without locking in designs that might not convert.
“Even our more complex designs can be done in Shogun within three days. For any brand with an in-house design team doing website maintenance, Shogun makes it easier.” — Phil Back, Senior UX Web Designer, GE Appliances
