Zobrist Software Group
The Pioneer of Smart Merchandizing

“Do you have these in gray?” you ask the store retailer, holding a pair of shoes. You like the design and its comfort, but the color does not match your taste.The retailer picks up another pair from the shelf behind him. “We have these shoes in gray instead; it’s a different design.”

“No, I’ll look around.” You put down the shoes and leave the store, disappointed. You go home and try your luck in online stores, browsing through tens of product pages, but to no avail. Even if the shoe design matches your preference, the color or material doesn’t. In the end, you give up and choose the second-best option.

Today, Vans Inc., a worldwide footwear and apparel company, is changing this status quo by enabling its customers to design their ‘perfect shoes’ in the exact color, texture, and size they want, without having them settle for the second-best option. Any consumer can just go to the ‘Custom Shoes’ page on Vans’ online store, pick any shoe type from a wide selection, and start customizing it according to their own preference. Owing to these capabilities, Vans is becoming a looming figure in the footwear space, with a year-on-year growth figure of 36 percent.

This kind of personalized attention is what every consumer expects today from their favorite brands. In this instance, the architect behind Vans’ ‘Custom Shoes’ capability was Zobrist Software Group—a provider of enterprise-level ecommerce storefronts, mobile commerce applications, and managed services. Likewise, Zobrist has been helping many industry leaders like Vans optimize their smart merchandizing capabilities and generate millions in online revenue. As a result, Zobrist’s clients are winning the hearts of consumers all around the world by always being one step ahead of their expectations.

Entering the Age of Personalization

“Unlike in the past, when brick and mortar was the primary revenue pipeline, today, businesses are relying on their online capabilities to stay relevant,” says Teresa Zobrist, president and CEO of Zobrist Software Group. Especially in the wake of the pandemic, it is imperative for organizations to strengthen their online presence by adding robust e-commerce capabilities. “But it is not just about establishing a strong e-commerce presence. In order to stay at the helm of the online retail revolution, organizations always need to anticipate what their customers want,” notes Teresa.

In the e-commerce world, personalization is all about guiding the consumers to the exact product they need in the shortest period. To achieve this, organizations often end up hiring large teams to sort, sequence, and strategize the placement of products in their online stores. Again, these teams have to depend on troves of siloed consumer data to obtain the necessary insights needed to assess the popularity of certain products and prioritize them during each season. Today, Zobrist offers a more effective method that will enable organizations to shed their expensive manual workflows and achieve greater conversion rates.

By integrating Zobrist’s Smart Merchandizer with their online retail stores, brands can centralize, automate, optimize, and simplify the entire merchandizing process. Instead of sifting through endless content, clients can depend on the readily available insights on the Smart Merchandizer, which are drawn from multiple sources, including Google Analytics and social media platforms. Based on these insights, clients can simply drag-and-drop their most popular products and arrange them strategically on their web pages. Thus, by streamlining access and showcasing products that consumers want, organizations can not only enhance engagement in their online stores but also provide an incentive for the consumers to return.

Higher Consumer Satisfaction Equals Higher Revenue Growth

For Zobrist, empowering online retail stores does not stop at smart merchandizing. The company takes it a step further with Mobiecom—a single page application (SPA) built in ReactJS with modern APIs. Using Mobiecom, clients can significantly enhance the capabilities of their online stores in terms of performance, and mobile responsiveness, enabling impeccable navigation for consumers.

Zobrist’s clients are winning the hearts of consumers all around the world by always being one step ahead of their expectations

Using the functionalities of the robust mobile platform, e-commerce organizations and their consumers can bid goodbye to slow-loading, time-consuming, and non-responsive web pages. Mobiecom can instantly load single or multiple pages and keeps everything cached on the browser. Additionally, organizations can leverage Mobiecom to guide their consumers through an excellent assortment of products before seamlessly taking them down a quick checkout path, making online shopping a breeze. “When e-commerce brands are losing millions due to their slow-loading mobile web pages, we are helping our clients reinvent their brand reputation by providing lighting fast mobile shopping through Mobiecom,” says Teresa.

Building on its commercial success with the launch of The Bishop Company, the software will also integrate with other popular e-commerce platforms (including HCL Commerce, Adobe Magento 2, Salesforce Commerce Cloud) using representational state transfer (REST) APIs. Hence, it is a cakewalk for clients to mix and match best-of-breed microservices as per their evolving requirements while preserving their initial investment on the UI (User Interface).

Guiding Clients to Success

Notably, the unparalleled online retail merchandizing capabilities offered by Zobrist have successfully wooed some of the biggest retail giants in the industry, including The North Face, Vans, Timberland and JanSport. In the case of JanSport, even though the leading provider of packs and outdoor gear had experienced an uptick in their business after implementing an online storefront, managing it thereon became a challenging task. The small B2C team at the company found it an arduous process to sift through the extensive product catalogs and organize those. Based on vast amounts of product data from multiple channels, including spreadsheets, they had to update the JanSport home page at least once a month, featuring the products that were most relevant at the time. Moreover, they had to update inventory and product attributes on a weekly or daily basis.

That was until Zobrist provided Smart Merchandiser to the merchandising team to visually manage products on the site, thus enabling them to organize their product catalogs using visual cues. By overlaying real-time data from various systems on the images of actual products, the company eliminated the need to research and digest analytics data. In fact, the JanSport team now has access to better product visualization across the entire online storefront for merchandizing decisions. They can seamlessly drag-and-drop products on the home page based on several product attributes, including size, color, and material, all in one place. After implementing Zobrist’s solution, JanSport’s productivity rate increased to 70 percent, with a 20 percent uptrend in the conversion rates.

This is but one of the success stories that Zobrist has facilitated over the years. “It is all thanks to the dedication of my employees, who are collectively fostering innovation and contributing to the growth of the company,” says Teresa. The environment of mutual trust and caring between the leadership and the employees goes a long way in bolstering the company’s relationship with its clients.
Indeed, with an unwavering devotion to its clients, Zobrist is quickly becoming a go-to software solution provider in the online retail space. Driven by optimism, the company is laser-focused on further enhancing the capabilities of its software solutions and making them available on a broader range of online platforms. In parallel, Zobrist will also establish its footprint in the B2B marketplace, introducing greater speed, mobility, and agility into its mobile e-commerce offerings. “We are at the right place at the right time, and we will ensure that our clients are always one step ahead of the e-commerce evolution,” concludes Teresa.