eCommerce

A Future-Proof Composable Commerce Experience with Storyblok

Headquarters: Winchester, Hampshire, UK
Technology Stack: Storyblok, commercetools, Bynder, Algolia, Pimberly

98% ↑ Overall Conversion Rate
28.4% ↓ Website Load Time
100% SEO Lighthouse

The Micheldever Group (opens in a new window) began over 50 years ago. Today, it’s one of UK’s largest wholesalers, distributors, and retailers of tires. They do this as both a B2B wholesaler and a D2C retailer. Operations go through their new Protyre.co.uk (opens in a new window) website and 184 wholly-owned centers branded as Protyre Autocare. They also provide MOTs and mechanical services.

With their exponential growth, it was clear to Micheldever Group that they needed to reconsider their entire approach to eCommerce. Storyblok's Partner Profound, acquired by Candyspace (opens in a new window) in 2024, helped them modernize their consumer eCommerce experience and stay competitive. Their new composable and headless setup with Storyblok has helped deliver impressive results. It delivered a 28.4% decrease in website load time. They saw an improvement in the overall conversion rate by 98%.

The Micheldever Group – Protyre.co.uk project was the winner of the 2024 UK Digital Excellence Awards (opens in a new window), in the B2C Website of the Year category. It honors and rewards outstanding digital websites, marketing campaigns, software and tools, and digital agencies and teams delivering results and profitability.

At the end of the day, a commerce platform is going to take orders. But without the support of a CMS like Storyblok, it wouldn’t be able to tell the brand and product stories. Using an eCommerce platform that has a built-in CMS would not have been able to manage, reuse, and deliver content like Storyblok.

James Crook , Enterprise Architect at Profound

Staying ahead of the competition

Micheldever Group’s previous website was hosted on an outdated infrastructure. With that, Micheldever Group was struggling to deliver exceptional customer experiences. In a nutshell, Profound had to help overcome the following challenges:

An outdated infrastructure: A challenge that was causing slow-loading pages, incomplete product listings, and non-crawlable pages.
Inability to improve the brand’s SEO: The setup in place did not allow for the implementation of SEO functionalities.
Lack of new features to enhance the shopping experience: Features necessary to expand into paid acquisition channels such as Google shopping.
Lack of agility: The legacy platform in place required a lot of manpower to maintain and release improvements.

The best plausible solution was a migration of the site to a composable/MACH architecture with a headless front-end. A setup that would deliver a faster website and improve product listing visibility. One that would help improve SEO and the shopping experience by expanding into paid acquisition channels. Lastly, an agile setup that is easy to maintain and comes with a lower cost of ownership.

A future-proof composable commerce experience

Micheldever Group realized they needed to undergo a digital transformation. One that would drive efficiency and enable growth. This meant that they couldn’t settle for just anything. They needed to improve the experience of both internal users and external customers. Moreover, they needed to find a way to manage the changing customer landscape. The only way to do that was with a future-proof architecture.

In regards to the tech stack, it was clear that the need for flexibility and agility would best be served with a composable architecture. Moreover, a headless composable approach was the ideal setup. A setup that would separate the front-end experience from the back-end technologies. One that ensures a customer experience that was unconstrained by old rigid systems. This would also ease the operationalization of data. That way, data could flow seamlessly and surface quickly in the appropriate front-end customer-facing areas.

Rather than defaulting to technologies that are built once, maintained, and then torn down and rebuilt, Micheldever Group opted out for a composable future-proof architecture. A SaaS-based approach that satisfies the forward-thinking view of the brand.

Tim McMillen, CEO & Founder of Profound

Profound worked with the Micheldever team to select the best technology mix of modern cloud-native, API-first, headless systems. The current technology stack consists of:

Storyblok: Content Management
commercetools (opens in a new window): eCommerce
Pimberly (opens in a new window): Product Information Management
Bynder (opens in a new window): Digital Asset Managent
Algolia (opens in a new window): Site Search and Discovery Engine

Storyblok’s CMS for Protyre

As a Content Management System (CMS), Storyblok was extremely appealing to Profound’s engineering team. This was Profound’s first time working with Storyblok and the team was impressed with the CMS. From the agency’s perspective, Storyblok was the obvious choice due to its following attributes:

Ease of use
The API structure of Storyblok (opens in a new window) is what contributed to the ease of use for developers. It gave the team flexibility of choice. Moreover, Storyblok’s well-organized documentation (opens in a new window) made it easier to integrate and use Storblok.
Flexible Data Schemas (opens in a new window)
As a market leader, Storyblok was able to provide a design experience like no other CMS. Developers were able to structure their blocks as assets and separate them from data sources inside the platform. They could also repurpose existing blocks and structures on different pages, instead of building from scratch. This provided the developers with a quick start and fast development.
Affordability (opens in a new window)
In comparison to the rest of the CMS players, Storyblok’s transparent and scalable pricing was the best fit. It provided Micheldever with great value for the money.
Continued Support (opens in a new window)
Storyblok’s team provided confidence and reassurance throughout the process.

Storyblok’s CMS was also very appealing to the marketers and editors at Micheldever Group. They have to manage a heavy content page for Protyre that includes way more than just product descriptions. The site offers servicing information and advice, blog articles, news, tire comparisons, and much more. Storyblok’s CMS was a perfect match for the creation, management, and delivery of the site’s heavy content.

Looking into the future

Micheldever Group’s digital transformation of its retail brand Protyre, provides a frictionless buying experience. Today, users can order tires online, book a service, and arrange an MOT check at the same time.

The company adopted the MACH architecture principles to ensure flexibility, agility, and futureproofing. The new platform delivers faster performance, improved business agility, and efficient operationalization of data. The site experienced a 98% increase in overall conversions, with a 115% increase in mobile and a 65% increase in desktop conversion rates. Moreover, it has a Lighthouse SEO score of 100, which is exceptional.

Most importantly, Micheldever Group’s digital transformation has provided their retail brand, Protyre, with a future-proof and scalable platform. One that will allow them to continue being a leader in the ever-changing customer landscape.