Pella Reduces Cart Abandonment by 40% and Drives Double-Digit Growth with Elastic Path and AWS

Founded in 1925, Pella offers quality, tailor-made windows and doors for both commercial and residential buildings. While Pella had seen plenty of change over the past century, the window and door industry was slow to adopt the online purchasing tools that were standard in other markets. There’s a reason for this—custom-built products require a greater level of guidance and personalization to meet customer needs. Pella’s process demanded more upfront information than most homeowners had the time or specialized knowledge to provide, making online purchases complex and confusing. That’s why Pella required in-home consultations with sales representatives for detailed measurements and conversations.

However, the company recognized it missed opportunities to engage customers who preferred a digital buying experience and transparent pricing over traditional in-home consultations. For its first DTC model, Pella used a monolithic ecommerce platform, digitizing its processes without reimagining the user experience. Its configure, price, quote (CPQ) tool required customers to answer around 50 questions, deterring buyers looking for a simpler digital experience. With over eight octillion possible product combinations, Pella needed a more flexible, composable architecture to manage the complex configurations required to educate customers and guide them through purchasing. Pella also wanted the solution to seamlessly integrate with existing systems to support business operations while allowing for continuous growth and innovation.

Pella needed a partner to help it make the shift to a composable commerce model. The company encouraged its developers to help evaluate multiple vendors on factors such as technical architecture, support capabilities, and cultural fit. Ultimately, they selected Elastic Path for its modularity and its alignment with Pella’s flexibility and growth goals. This change, supported by the scalable infrastructure of AWS, enabled the company to build a more customer-centric, customizable experience for purchasing windows and doors. It took less than a year to implement the new solution powered by Elastic Path, with a beta version launched in just seven months. Acting as the ecommerce engine, Elastic Path integrated with existing systems to manage a complex product catalog and supporting dynamic window configurations tailored to customer needs. In particular, Elastic Path supported flexible cart capabilities using custom cart items, a unique capability which allows Pella to process orders for any product, even those that haven’t been saved in the Elastic Path Composable Commerce platform. This way, Pella avoids the massive SKU explosion and enterprise resource planning (ERP) data management challenges that would come from adding and maintaining millions of products based on hyper-specific dimensions. Overall, Elastic Path’s API-first, composable architecture allowed Pella to swap out or add specific components, such as modern payment solutions, without overhauling the entire tech stack.

The solution’s underlying AWS infrastructure played a crucial role in its flexibility, enabling faster API calls and smoother integration with existing systems. It served as a connector between Pella's existing CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) system, manufacturing components, and native applications. Services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) enabled scalable deployment of containerized applications for consistent performance during peak traffic periods. AWS Lambda handled backend processes with enhanced security by only running lightweight, short-duration tasks, minimizing the need for long-running servers. Meanwhile, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) offered cost-effective storage for hosting product assets, while Amazon CloudFront accelerated content delivery for faster end-user experiences. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) supported reliable database management, ensuring quick and consistent access to product and customer data. Additionally, Pella used infrastructure as code from Elastic Path Cloud Ops for Kubernetes to define and manage its AWS architecture. This approach allowed the company to quickly review, audit, and deploy new changes, making it possible to launch new features or even entire websites within hours.

With its new digital-first solution from Elastic Path and AWS, Pella became the first national window and door company to offer a fully customized, direct-to-consumer buying experience online. It now provides transparent, dynamic pricing and self-service capabilities that differentiate it in a traditionally in-person industry. Pella was able to simplify the buying journey by identifying key questions that mattered most to users, reducing its original 50 configuration questions to 17, a reduction of 66 percent. Its flexible product configuration management allows for quick handling of a vast range of variations. The solution’s composable architecture enables Pella to quickly adjust its tech stack, supporting expansion into new regions and streamlining multi-channel operations. This efficiency also frees up resources to enhance customer self-education tools like blogs and virtual consultations, aiding buyers in making complex decisions.

Pella reduced the time needed to generate and edit quotes for default window configurations by more than 50 percent—from over a minute to less than 30 seconds. Using AWS further improved the user experience by reducing page load times from double digits to single seconds. “We needed a solution that could bring the best of our in-home consultations to the online world. Elastic Path’s flexibility made that possible, boosted by the speed and reliability of AWS,” said Rebecca Hicks, senior digital product manager at Pella. “We’ve cut configuration steps down to just the essentials, creating a smoother, faster experience that really resonates with today’s buyers.” Even when customers drop off during their journey, targeted follow-ups via nurture campaigns and personalized emails have reduced cart abandonment by 40 percent, boosting conversion rates. These improvements have driven double-digit annual growth in Pella's ecommerce channel. With Elastic Path and AWS, Pella can keep optimizing its platform, confident it can scale seamlessly to support ongoing growth and evolving customer needs.