Shoe Carnival is a leader in family footwear — and the brand is growing at a rapid pace. The expansion of the company’s digital presence through recent acquisitions means that all eyes are on the digital storefront experience. With a small but mighty engineering and product team, Shoe Carnival needs flexibility, operational efficiency, and minimal technical debt. The brand turned to Composable Storefront for a highly performant architecture that allows the team to offload maintenance and enables them to focus on what really matters: the customer experience.
We caught up with Ned Moore, Head of Ecommerce Product, Engineering, & UX Design at Shoe Carnival, to learn more about the migration and its success so far. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.
Q: Can you tell us about the build versus buy decision and what the migration was like?
As we made our decision at Shoe Carnival, the biggest question for us was, “Where do we want to be great?” As a small engineering and product team, we realized that building and maintaining our own custom storefront on top of our headless architecture with Commerce Cloud was creating too much overhead and technical debt. And that’s okay because we see technology as an enabling function, not our primary skill. We want to be great at understanding our customers and enhancing their experience on our site.
The truth is, building a custom storefront in-house came at an increased cost and required more resources to support. At Shoe Carnival, I literally only have three engineers and a DevOps person, and we primarily focus on front-end development. That’s our bread and butter and where we really shine. For us, deciding to use the Composable Storefront has meant that we can focus on the things that we’re best at, the types of work that differentiate our customer experience. We’re able to leave everything else — all the heavy lifting — to people that are better suited for that.
Another consideration for us during the build-it-or-buy-it discussion was our performance scores: Would the Composable Storefront be as performant as our custom app? The answer is yes. We proved that Salesforce’s Composable Storefront can be as performant, if not more performant than our previous app development. As a result, we saw a 39 basis-point lift in conversion. Now that we’ve replatformed, I’m happy to say that our journey so far has exceeded all of our expectations.
Q: Now that you’ve carried out a successful composable implementation, what are the most notable business outcomes?
Here’s one of the greatest outcomes: A few weeks ago our executive team asked me, “Are we prepared for holiday?” And for the first time in my 25+ years in this industry, I can say that I sleep really well during the holiday season because I don’t have to worry about infrastructure. I don’t have to worry about a meltdown. I might worry about third parties, but I don’t worry about Salesforce.
Composable commerce gives us the ability to scale as our traffic scales. When we enter peak days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we have an immense amount of confidence. And that allows us to focus on things that really matter. We don’t have to worry about whether servers are at capacity or whether we can handle the traffic from a freshly launched marketing campaign. We have peace of mind. That in and of itself is priceless.
Today, I carry the least amount of technical debt that I’ve ever carried as a Head of Product and Engineering. It’s the greatest freedom to no longer be burdened with an immense amount of technical debt and to be able to launch things cleanly.
Q: Now that you’ve significantly reduced your technical debt and you don’t need to focus on maintenance, how have your releases changed?
Before, every release felt rocky and everything was a little bit cumbersome. Now that we don’t have to worry about the technical details, our releases have more simplicity and we have more confidence. We can deploy at will, at any point in time, and know that our infrastructure will be able to handle it.
Instead of worrying about technical details, we can worry about what our customers actually experience. Our Composable Storefront gives us ease and flexibility to truly enhance shopping. Now, the majority of what we deliver is new capabilities, new enhancements, new improvements — not bug fixes. If you’ve been in ecommerce for a while, you know that sometimes it seems like you go through cycles where all you seem to be doing is bashing bugs. It’s been such a long time here at Shoe Carvel and Shoe Station since we had a release dedicated to bug fixes.
We have some aggressive goals for Shoe Station and that means we need to make investments and dedicate resources to things that will grow our business, not just maintenance.
Q: What tangible business results has this all translated into? How does the technology help move your brand forward?
Shoe Carnival is a multi-site, multi-brand, multi-domain business. We acquired Shoe Station in 2021. Then we acquired Rogan Shoes in 2024. We may have even more acquisitions in our future — and that means we need flexibility. It’s crucial for us to be able to easily absorb those acquisitions and spin up new websites as needed.
When we initially acquired Shoe Station, it was a site that had no ecommerce presence. By 2027, we expect it to represent 51% of our store fleet. That’s a testament to a unified commerce platform that’s extendable. When the company strategy shifted suddenly to invest in Shoe Station, we were already prepared because we can develop once and deploy to both sites simultaneously. We don’t need to repeat work on multiple sites, which is invaluable when it comes to these sorts of multi-tenant architectures.
Q: Now that you’ve done this migration, what would you say to brands considering composable commerce? What should they be thinking about as they evaluate options?
It all comes down to one thing: Freedom. What level of freedom do you want your teams to have?
With composable, it’s really easy for us to swap and replace an underperforming partner if we want to. If we want to completely alter the experience two weeks from now, we can do that. That level of freedom is something that took me several years to accomplish at other companies. I can honestly say that freedom is something I never thought I’d have again, much less with a team that is a fraction of the size, with a fraction of the resources, and in a fraction of the time. It’s a truly remarkable thing.
Composable means we’re free to do whatever we think is best for our business. Our team is able to stay relentlessly focused on how we drive value. After all, value is in production, not development.
Q: You’ve been in this industry for a while, and you’ve seen a number of ecommerce migrations. How is this one different?
To state it simply: This one was different because we didn’t focus on the technology — we focused on the business outcomes. Technology is not a religion. But at Shoe Carnival, what is a religion to us is shoes. Shoes and our customers are the things that we value immensely. We know that if we put the right shoes in front of the right customer, they’re going to buy them and love them. For me, it’s personal. Shoes have always been an important part of my life because it’s the business my dad was in for almost four decades. I still remember the joy and excitement I had as a kid every time I got a new pair of shoes.
Customers and shoes come first, and the ecommerce architecture is just an enabler. We lose sight of that when we get lost in these debates over technology. But at the end of the day, we have nothing without the customer. Our customers don’t care whether or not we’re composable or not. They don’t care which platform we’re on. They don’t care who our cloud provider is. Our customers just want shoes and a pleasant experience buying them. Technology is a means to that end.
We have a speed to market that was entirely inaccessible a decade ago. Back then, it could take years to bring things to life. Then it became months. Today, we’re able to take a meaningful idea and put it into production within hours — and that’s a game-changer. Why? Because it changes our customers’ perception of us. It changes their experience with us.
That’s where the simplicity and the beauty comes into it. When you do it right, technology is just there to serve.
Listen to the full interview for more details about Shoe Carnival’s journey
Learn how the brand launched composable architecture globally.
