The Client
Crimson’s client is an internationally renowned, affordable, online fashion brand formed in the UK. Focusing on the 16 to 34 female market, our client now has a presence in the US, Australia, France and Germany, and a £100 million turnover.
The Challenge
During Cyber Weekend 2014, this includes the infamous Black Friday – the last payday before Christmas, the client’s website struggled to cope with the massive influx of transactions from customers looking for affordable fashion.
Eventually, the site’s backend crashed because it couldn’t handle the weight of numbers.
The client is renowned for their rapid stock replenishment and distribution capabilities. It launches 1000 new products on its site every week. Thus, the client felt that the failure to meet their customers’ demands onBlack Friday was unacceptable.
Crimson had helped the client’s Chief Technical Officer (CTO) to launch his previous employer, another major retailer, in the US. It is now estimated to be worth $33 billion.
The CTO approached Crimson to help him find a solution to user capacity issues of the client’s website.Crimson helped the client to develop its retail technology strategy and then won a tender to deliver specialist managed IT services.
The Strategy
Crimson set about establishing a staging layer between the client’s original Magento website and its new Red Prairie warehouse management system, its XPO logistics DXL distribution system, and its Sage 200 product management software.
This allowed all the systems to work independently from each other, whilst communicating effectively and taking pressure off the website.
The filtering solution also gave the client’s team with the ability to evolve these processes and improve customer experience. It went live on 18 September 2015.
ROI
Ultimately, Crimson’s solution enables our client’s website to handle 500 customer orders per minute.
Due to what is physically achievable by the client’s team, they can realistically cope with a maximum of 120 orders per minute.
With the average order costing £42, the website could earn the retailer more than£300,000 per hour.
This customisable system took Crimson just six months to create and install.
Client Quote
The client said: “We’re more reactive and more agile than 99% of our competitors. Our product is very strong and something that we’re continuously improving.
“We know what our customer wants, and by having this reactivity and using this data to make our next design decision, it means we’re giving the customer exactly what they want, and that’s key in retail.”
