Enabling an apparel retailer’s $1 billion eCommerce operations with enhanced customer journeys

Brief

SkillNet partnered with the client to support peak season traffic with rich online customer journeys resulting in increased growth.

About the client

The client is an internationally recognized omnichannel retailer of women’s, men’s and children’s apparel, shoes and accessories. The Company operates close to 500 retail stores & several online properties across a variety of brands.

Challenge | Supporting new customer journeys and increased online traffic with legacy systems

The client had a very large and successful eCommerce operation (close to a billion USD). Since peak season transactions and traffic contributed heavily to the growth of online operations, the client’s team wanted to offer enhanced customer journeys with new shopping features and increased personalization, while ensuring that the systems could scale to support increased volumes.

The client’s legacy systems had been in place for a while and had all the challenges of a monolith system. Ongoing product updates to the web site were not only time consuming, but also resource intensive. Since it was also difficult to support new customer journeys and the expected demands during peak time traffic, they also decided to relook at their eCommerce systems.

Solution | Enabling seamless eCommerce migration

It was decided to migrate to newer cloud-based retail system using microservices architecture. Given that eCommerce contributed heavily to the company revenues, any upgrade or changes to the site had to be undertaken without impacting the ongoing operations. SkillNet’s not only managed the risk but also ensured seamless migration of order management which was then followed by the new cloud-based eCommerce system.

To ensure a smooth migration to the cloud the SkillNet team translated the business processes of the legacy systems. After decoupling the legacy retail system from other services, the team created enhanced customer journeys for online and mobile users. New features like cart notification (change in prices), alerts, gamification (which enables cross selling & customized promotions) have been added to enhance customer’s shopping experience.

Results | Online growth with enhanced customer journeys on the cloud

Since the web pages are now server based, they load faster and this has improved customer experience. The new features on the site like cart notification, alerts and gamification have resulted in a 10% increase in year-on-year eCommerce sales. The site soon clocked $1 billion.

The platform processes several thousands of orders daily during peak season and supports multi-million dollars in orders in an hour across brands.

A new UI has resulted in a massive surge in mobile sales with 15% conversion of mobile orders across brands. There were days when smart phones contributed to 84% of the traffic.

The headless commerce system also ensures that changes to the front end can be made quickly and developers save time on user interface change, resulting in increased efficiencies.

The new system also ensured increased efficiencies in inventory and order management systems.

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