Unified Commerce Proof of Concept

In short: A multi-division manufacturer had four disconnected websites and a 40-page deck that couldn’t get leadership to fund a fix. For a fixed $2,500, we built a board-ready, clickable proof of concept they could understand in ninety seconds — and turned the most resistant division’s objection into alignment. The consolidation is now in front of the board with the visual proof the owner asked for.

Manufacturing — commercial, educational, and institutional environments

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The situation

Their marketing and e-commerce lead knew what needed to happen. A few months into the role, he could see the problem clearly: four separate websites, four divisions, one customer base that didn’t care about any of it.

There was the flagship furniture site. A second brand site for a related product line. A technical resource hub for the casework division, where architects pulled Revit files and spec sheets for fully custom builds. And a Shopify Plus storefront on a subdomain, handling a narrow band of fast-ship products. Three of the four ran on WordPress, request-for-quote only.

A customer needing a lab table and a run of built-in casework had to figure out which brand made what, then navigate two entirely different sites to get there.

He built the case. Forty pages of it. He presented it to leadership.

It didn’t land.

The owner wouldn’t approve a development budget based on a slide deck. He wanted to see the thing. Not described — shown.

“A very non-ecom group. Even if I say this is a placeholder image, they can’t get past what they’re seeing.” — Marketing & E-commerce Lead

That’s a harder problem than it sounds. He wasn’t fighting skepticism about the strategy. He was fighting the limits of the format.

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What made it complicated

The consolidation wasn’t just an information architecture exercise.

Product complexity. Configurable options — materials, edge banding, leg configurations — generated an enormous SKU count. A third-party product configurator was already under contract to handle dynamic product rendering into an RFQ cart, with a 30–60 day runway.

Data integrity. The legacy sites pulled from an unmaintained ERP, spawning a separate landing page for every individual SKU. The company was mid-migration to a new ERP platform across all manufacturing facilities to establish a single source of truth — a prerequisite for the configurator to work at all.

Four different buyers. A school district purchasing agent, a distributor rep, a commercial architect specifying custom casework, and a direct consumer all needed to find their path within seconds of landing.

And the politics. The divisions were protective of their own identity. The casework group most of all — they’d spent years as what their own leadership candidly called the forgotten division. Any unified site that read as “the furniture brand, plus some other stuff” was going to fail internally before it ever reached a customer.

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What we did

The brief was unusual, so we scoped to it directly: produce a board-ready visualization of a unified catalog. Not a working site. Not a redesign. An artifact convincing enough to unlock a budget.

Pre-session analysis. Before anyone got on a call, we ran the client’s sitemaps, brand guidelines, and sample product feeds through our BMAD prototyping engine — surfacing catalog overlaps, structural conflicts, and navigation collisions across all four properties.

A two-hour discovery panel. One working session with the marketing lead, the e-commerce manager, and the creative director. We mapped the distinct buyer journeys live, using BMAD in the room to iterate on navigation flows as the conversation happened rather than disappearing for three weeks to produce a document.

An interactive proof of concept. Not static wireframes — a clickable, hosted prototype at desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints, showing two brands unified on a single page with real navigation paths. Alongside it, a Project Brief documenting core requirements and the technical path forward.

The whole thing ran on a fixed $2,500 fee.

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Where it got interesting

He took an early version into a leadership preview. It came back confusing.

The top of the page worked — a clear fork between the two divisions. Everything below it read as furniture-brand content, which quietly confirmed exactly what the casework group feared.

He shared a competitor’s site that afternoon as a reference: two divisions, no navigation, pick a path. Radically simpler.

We had two rebuilt directions back to him the following Monday.

Stripped navigation. Two equal blocks, each with its own logo. Everything cluttering the lower page removed. One version with rounded corners, one squared, so he could compare aesthetics without another round trip.

And one deliberate choice that had nothing to do with design: we put the casework division first. Left to right, first thing you see. A division that had spent years feeling overlooked would open the page and find itself at the front.

He approved it for his stakeholders the same day.

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The outcome

We delivered a board-ready artifact in nine weeks for $2,500 — replacing a 40-page deck that hadn’t moved anyone with something leadership could click through and understand in ninety seconds.

Just as importantly, the POC did work a document couldn’t: it gave the most resistant division something concrete to see itself in, turning an internal objection into an alignment conversation.

The consolidation is now in front of the board with the visual proof the owner asked for, and the signals coming back are positive. The forty-page version never got that far.

The engagement also validated something for us. Running BMAD against client documentation before discovery — then iterating live in-session — compressed what has traditionally been a multi-week design cycle into same-week turnarounds. When a client comes off a difficult leadership meeting on Friday, having new directions in their hands by Monday is the difference between momentum and a stalled initiative.

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Why this matters if you’re in the same spot

If you’re carrying an initiative that everyone nods along to and nobody funds, the problem usually isn’t your reasoning. It’s that decision-makers can’t picture the end state, and no amount of additional slides will fix that.

A proof of concept is cheaper than a rejected proposal. It’s certainly cheaper than a second year of the status quo.

Considering a consolidation, replatform, or unified commerce initiative? Let’s talk about what it would take to show it instead of describe it.

Start a conversation →

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Razoyo is an e-commerce development agency based in Dallas, Texas. We work in Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, and OroCommerce, with particular depth in catalog architecture, product data, and complex navigation for manufacturers and B2B sellers.