RDO Equipment Co. Leverages Progress Sitefinity During its Digital Transformation, Enabling First-Time Ecommerce Sales

RDO Equipment Co. is one of North America's largest heavy equipment dealers for the agricultural, construction and irrigation industries. With their legacy website due for a redesign, they trusted Sitefinity again for a complete digital transformation. RDO sought to improve its website experience from the back end (to ensure ease of management through a more efficient build), enable its marketing team more control over the customer journey and start selling its products online.

As Scott Zachry, Senior Project Manager, Americaneagle.com, commented, “If you're not selling your products online or making your services available to online customers, you're missing a very large gap in the customer base, which is growing every day, as mobile devices become more and more accessible and online shopping becomes increasingly prevalent.”

RDO partnered with Americaneagle.com to undergo a complete digital transformation to resolve its pain points and further customize its Sitefinity implementation for the next chapter in its digital journey.

Americaneagle.com upgraded Sitefinity to make it even easier for RDO to use, replacing their legacy content site with a robust, comprehensive, headless solution integrating Sitefinity as the CMS, BigCommerce as the ecommerce engine and checkout, an enterprise search solution, Akeneo as the product information management software, multiple RDO back-office systems and the John Deere parts catalog user interface/shopping experience. This was the most practical way that Americaneagle.com could leverage what was working, and integrate natively with it, to accommodate the rapid change of the digital presence and the many backend systems that Sitefinity had to integrate with.

This was the first headless ecommerce site that Americaneagle.com has done and Sitefinity has powered. This means that the website served as a presentation layer where all the interactions were happening, aside from the checkout experience itself (which for PCI compliance reasons was powered by BigCommerce). Sitefinity was tapped to power the entire presentation layer of the website and provide the state-of-the-art Content Management System (CMS), a key facet in the digital transformation. Sitefinity was able to:

• Ensure that everything on the site felt native, despite many customizations.
• Provide full control over the presentation layer, which allowed for the integration of all the site pages with native drag and drop capabilities.
• Build RDO’s product detail pages (for nearly 500k products), images, graphics, designs, colors and content.
• Control the “add to cart”, “request to quote”, “apply for financing”, inventory and all the different calls to action.
• Provide APIs for flexibility for developers to customize the security layer based on stable, documented extensibility points to allow for customer information to be stored outside of Sitefinity (needed for PCI compliance).
• Provide full control over the HTML, which allowed for clean, precise developer control over what’s being rendered (critical on a Java-heavy site).

The catalog browsing experience and the search experience on the site are provided on the native site with widgets, which content editors can drag and drop, configure and even personalize. This allowed the marketing team to integrate all the search landing pages, like category pages, with marketing content and to tune search and recommendations from one location, despite the data coming in from many sources.

As Scott Zachary, Americaneagle.com, explained, “The rebuild introduced an opportunity to provide the tools for personalization and experience marketing that they need in order to meet their immediate and long-term goals without a lot of development dependencies. Now if they want to market used equipment or used tractors from Permira, a leading tractor brand, they can use all the marketing content tools from Sitefinity to curate an experience that will drive customers to those pages. The capabilities offered by Sitefinity brings that to the table. It’s really powering that end-to-end user experience which is controlled by the content management capabilities.”