Astound Digital and the art of removing friction

AllSaints had a peculiar obstacle between a shopper and a purchase: a checkout that ran to more than seven pages. A fashion brand could make somebody want a leather jacket, then ask that person to navigate a miniature bureaucracy. Astound Digital’s case study describes the repair: a redesigned Salesforce Commerce Cloud site, connected payment and cross-border services, and a checkout compressed into one page.

That small journey explains a large company surprisingly well. Astound works in the space between the promise a brand makes and the machinery required to keep it. The customer wants to buy, book, cancel, or get help. Inside the business, those simple verbs can require several systems to cooperate. Astound’s job is to make the cooperation happen.

Seven pages between wanting and buying

At AllSaints, the work included Salesforce Page Designer for content management and integrations with Avalara, Adyen, and Global-e. Astound reports launching three localized storefronts in one month. That is a specific rollout milestone; it should not be read as the duration of the entire engagement. The interesting achievement is how much technical coordination sits underneath a shorter checkout.

There is a lesson here for anyone commissioning a redesign. Count the decisions and handoffs a customer must survive. An attractive page can still inherit a cumbersome process. Reducing that process may require changes to payments, tax, fulfillment, and content tools, as well as the screen. The visible improvement is often the last link in the chain.

A bigger brief than a storefront

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2000, the business became known as Astound Commerce. Its founders were Igor Gorin, Ilya Vinogradsky, and Roman Martynenko. In 2021, RLH Equity Partners agreed to invest, with Salesforce Ventures also participating. The investment supported expansion into additional capabilities and markets.

Bill Donlan became global CEO in January 2024, with a brief that included AI, data, and broader Salesforce capabilities. The company adopted the Astound Digital name that year. Its offer now spans strategy, experience design, commerce, sales and service modernization, integration, performance marketing, and ongoing optimization. The word “Digital” gives it room to follow a customer relationship beyond the transaction.

This is a professional services business. Clients engage teams to plan, design, implement, and maintain systems; accelerators provide reusable starting points. Salesforce is central to the practice, while its partner ecosystem also includes Shopify, payments providers, and content technologies. Astound occupies the territory between a digital agency and a systems integrator, combining customer-facing design with the connections underneath.

Donlan has described the firm as an alternative to bigger IT services consultancies, with a different cost structure. That is its competitive pitch. Buyers still have to compare the actual team, scope, and commercial terms. A specialist partner is useful when the work needs sustained coordination across platforms; a straightforward store may have a much smaller problem to solve.

An eye test is a different kind of conversion

Consider Boots Opticians. Its old storefront sat within the main Boots UK site. The immediate goal was to help people research products and book eye tests. Astound built a standalone Salesforce Commerce Cloud site using its Launch 360 Accelerator, with discovery, design, five development sprints, SEO work, and analytics.

An October 2026 customer showreel dates early design discussions to June 2025 and the live site to February 2026. Boots describes increased traffic and improved movement toward appointment booking. James Skinner, its head of digital experience, said the accelerator and limited customizations “got us to MVP very rapidly.” The customer’s next useful action determined the design brief.

“got us to MVP very rapidly”James Skinner / Boots Opticians

Other engagements reveal different obstacles. At Cybex, service staff lacked access to crucial order history across disconnected Salesforce systems. Astound connected commerce, marketing, service, loyalty, and order management. At Zermatt, separate hotel and activity checkouts fragmented a holiday. A destination marketplace brought those purchases into a single cart and sought to reduce dependence on online travel agencies.

The agent needs somewhere to send the request

Engine, the business travel platform, offers another version of the same problem. Working with Salesforce and Astound, it introduced EVA, a virtual assistant for tasks including cancellations. Salesforce Flow and outbound APIs connected the assistant to the systems required to carry out the request. Recognizing intent was one step; completing the booking action was another.

Salesforce reported that Engine expected about $2 million in annual savings from its first AI tools. That figure is a forecast. For a buyer, the practical question is which completed tasks will produce the saving, and how those tasks will be measured. Astound’s subsequent AVA voice framework extends its automation work into spoken service interactions.

The revealing customer was Astound itself

Astound encountered its own integration lesson while adopting Certinia professional services software. CLD Partners describes pilots running alongside legacy systems that exposed poor visibility into staffing, overcomplicated processes, and fragmented reporting. Astound brought CLD in to help define a global minimum viable implementation and connect project financial information.

That experience also offers a practical buying test. Ask who owns the process after launch, which real users will test it, and what evidence would justify the next phase. A reusable accelerator can shorten familiar work, but the business still has to decide how people, records, and permissions should behave. Where ownership is unclear or the underlying data cannot support the promised action, an ambitious rollout has weak foundations. That is an inference from these projects, and a useful condition to check before copying their approach.

The change was methodological: smaller initial scope, clearer ownership, and acceptance testing organized around user roles. A company selling implementation expertise still needed another specialist and a disciplined pilot. That makes this episode especially useful. Software can expose an organization’s habits before it improves them. Start with real work, test the handoffs, and earn the right to expand.