To fulfill their brand promise, the US-based Ruggable strives to ensure that its home design products are accessible and livable for a wide range of customers worldwide. Today Ruggable sells their machine-washable rugs, doormats, pet beds, and other products to customers in ten countries outside of the US. “International sales are of growing importance,” says Dylan Feiner, Senior Product Manager at Ruggable. “As a business we want to increase our total addressable market. And international is one of our best growth levers for that.”
Ruggable’s ecommerce expansion initially involved launching net new Shopify stores for each new market they sold to. While this approach allowed them to capture international opportunities, it also expanded their operational overhead. So when considering how to best serve the Canadian market, the team wanted to find a more efficient path. Managing multiple catalogs had already introduced the risk of user error and increased operational costs with third party apps. To customize their buyer experience across markets and business lines in one place, Ruggable implemented Markets and multi-entity with Shopify Payments.
After switching to Markets and Multi-Entity management for their Canadian launch, Ruggable has:
- Saved over a quarter million dollars by launching in Canada using Shopify Payments to add a Canadian entity instead of creating a new store
- Reduced third party operational costs by over $55,000 per year
- Saved over 330 hours of upfront work on the project
- Saved up to 115 total hours per week of ongoing maintenance or almost 6,000 hours of work per year
The Challenge: More risk and time spent managing separate stores
The Ruggable team discovered that managing sales across their international markets through six separate Shopify stores introduced the risk of errors and hours of time spent manually updating product catalogs and third party applications.
“Depending on the task, we would have to manually sync our catalogs and update regional store content daily or every couple of days,” says Dylan. Dylan’s team uses Shopify conventions to support their separate ecommerce storefronts such as tags to support badges and meta fields to support unifying products. This increased the complexity involved in making even one change.
“If we were making a change to many different countries, then we would need to make changes across all those stores. When that happened, we had to reindex six different catalogs with a browse-and-search partner. There are an exponential amount of changes that need to occur when we are updating catalogs across all stores. It could take hours of work on a weekly basis.”
The Solution: Store management and localization made easy with unified commerce
Ruggable streamlined the creation and management of their regional online shopping experiences by implementing Markets for all their stores and Multi-Entity management via Shopify Payments for their Canada store. Because Markets aggregates all of a business’ expansion activity in one central place, Ruggable could easily update product and checkout content across regions. And by allowing merchants with multiple entities to run their businesses from a single admin, routed to different payment accounts, Multi-Entity management enabled Ruggable to simplify their backend operations and improve their customer experience, while enabling them to retain their existing storefront in Canada.
Ruggable used Markets to support different catalogs, currencies and site translations, which involved customizing content and showing or hiding certain products based on a customer’s region. The team used Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app with contextual storefronts to localize product pages and product recommendations to particular countries or regions.
“The biggest user experience issue is not being able to sell a customer something because they live in a certain region,” Dylan says. “Just being able to solve that problem at the push of a button was a huge boon. That's what we did when we launched Finland, Sweden, and Denmark.”
Dylan adds that because Markets supports different levels of localization, his team had a range of customization options. “We could turn on a store and sell products in local currency but have the content in English. Or we could localize product recommendations and content specifically for a customer’s region and language. One option is as simple as you can get and another is a lot more targeted.” he says.
An example of how Ruggable leveraged the various levels of customization available with Markets was their use of checkout blocks to show localized review and value proposition banners for their English-speaking versus French-speaking audiences on their Ruggable EU instance.
In addition to leveraging Markets, Ruggable adopted Multi-Entity management for its Canada store instead of opening what would have been a seventh separate store. “Multi-Entity management saved us from having to increase our workload,” Dylan says. “The US and Canada catalogs probably get updated the most. So that would have led to hours more work, more uploads, more maintenance updates, and another index that we would need to manage. It would have led to an exponential increase in the work that we needed to do and more operational costs.”
Dylan adds that transitioning systems to a new store would have been costly and time-consuming for every function of the business. “We’d need to sign new contracts with a bunch of different third party apps. And even our acquisition channels and our customer accounts would have been impacted during that transition because we would have different product IDs and customer IDs by necessity. The algorithms that drive our third party acquisition channels would have needed to basically start from scratch again,” Dylan says. “We might have lost past order data from customers shopping on the Canada store to manage a return or exchange for an order that they originally placed on the US store. It would have been, to put it mildly, an organizational nightmare for our teams. It would have taken hours and hours of cross-functional work. I can't even imagine the amount of hours our customer service team would have had to spend just dealing with Canada issues alone.”
Dylan adds that another benefit of Shopify Payments for Ruggable was its support of local payment options in many regions. “We found through a lot of third-party research that payment methods really matter based on region,” Dylan says. He adds that many customers prefer the iDEAL payment method in the Netherlands, for example.
As for the process for implementing Markets and Multi-Entity management, Dylan says that the Shopify team were ideal partners. “They catered to our needs, answered a ton of questions, and were very supportive. We couldn't have done this without them,” he says.
The Results: Freedom from manual tasks to embrace strategic opportunities
Because Ruggable was able to launch in Canada with Multi-Entity management without having to set up another Shopify store, they saved over 330 hours of total upfront work and up to 115 total weekly hours of ongoing maintenance. That ongoing work adds up to 5,980 hours per year. Dylan estimates that Shopify’s unified commerce solutions saved Ruggable over $55,000 in annual third-party operational costs alone.
Dylan says that his team will continue to optimize their Canada site with Shopify solutions and localize content to cater to Canadian customers who make up a crucial segment for the Ruggable brand. When the team expands to other countries through their dot.com, European, and Australian stores and are required to create local business entities, they will leverage Shopify Payments’ Multi-Entity management in those expansion efforts.
“For instance, if we were to launch in New Zealand from AU and New Zealand required us to have a New Zealand-based business entity, then Multi-Entity management with Shopify Payments would provide us an opportunity to expand from the existing store instead of launching a new store,” Dylan says.
As he reflects on his team’s decision to implement Markets and Multi-Entity management, Dylan thinks not just about the hours of work and high costs that these products helped Ruggable avoid but also the opportunities that they enabled.
“Even greater than the operational costs and hours saved is the opportunity cost of our people having to do these manual tasks out of necessity versus doing work that could have been more impactful overall to the business” Dylan says. “The impact of Markets and Multi-Entity management is less about what they enable us to do that's net new. It’s about how they enable us to continue doing the things that we had wanted to do in the first place and weren't just driven to do by necessity.”
I would recommend using Markets and Multi-Entity with Shopify Payments together if the alternative is trying to launch a new Shopify store. It is a whole lot easier to localize your catalog and show or hide products using Markets than it is to stand up a completely new Shopify store. Both in terms of the hours it takes to set up initially and ongoing maintenance.
