A High-touch E-store Makeover for a Multi-Brand Retailer

About the Customer

The customer is one of the largest multi-brand retail groups, with headquarters in Asia.
The group has supermarket chains and various retail subsidiaries catering to diverse business segments including lifestyle, fashion, footwear, food products and home improvement.

Business Challenge:

The multi-brand retail group had launched e-stores as part of its digital transformation strategy to enable e-selling of its wide range of product offerings.

1. All these online retail stores, under the parent group, were initially hosted on the Hybris platform. However, the cost associated with e-store maintenance was very high.

2. Additionally, the e-store was not able to handle the peak time traffic, with lengthy bouts of server downtime.

Over time, they felt the need for a more robust and cost-effective platform to run their e-commerce stores.

The client had collaborated with Embitel in the past for a digital commerce solution development. Based on the familiarity and trust gained during this collaboration, the retailer decided to entrust the task of this e-store makeover to Embitel.
 

Embitel Solution:

Embitel’s digital commerce consultants performed a detailed analysis of the existing e-store to identify the underlying performance issues and their root cause. To begin with, as per the client’s suggestion, the Embitel team started the platform makeover for the client’s flagship fashion online store.

The plan was to check the feasibility of the platform makeover and replicate the process in subsidiary ecommerce stores, only if the results were desirable.

1. Analysis: The team realised that the existing e-store framework required some critical feature enhancements and performance optimisation to seamlessly support the customer’s business goals.
2. Performance Optimization: The team optimized the platform to overcome the peak time performance issue. They identified the underlying issue with the backend framework and re-programmed it. This helped in bringing it down to zero server downtime due to peak time load, especially during seasonal sales.
3. E-commerce Integrations: The e-commerce store was integrated with key third-party applications including SAP (for order processing), PayU & PayPal- payment gateways, and Microsoft CRM for order data management, Customer Hub- Customer data management.
4. Migration of Subsidiary E-stores: Following the first phase of the project release, the customer observed a massive improvement in their e-store growth and performance. Hence, they decided to migrate the other subsidiary e-stores to this custom-designed framework on PHP.Embitel team successfully managed the migration of all the online retail stores from Hybris to custom PHP-based platform.
5. Mobile App Development: Our ecommerce mobile development team also developed a highly responsive and scalable mobile app for their fashion & groceries stores targeting a specific consumer group.
6. Customization: With the successful migration of their retail stores, the client requested Embitel to handle the migration of their Multi-Vendor Hyperlocal website. The team gathered the requirements for the project and successfully migrated the multi-vendor store, along with some framework customization. To cater to the need for accurate information about orders and stock availability, the backend was based on Back Order Processing (BOP).

Embitel Impact:

1. After migrating to the custom framework, our client’s e-store saw a massive improvement in performance, even during the peak hours.
2. The e-stores marked a record increase in revenue from online shopping post migration.
3. The client was able to successfully achieve their primary digital transformation goals – better and smoother customer experience, better brand reachability, increased sales & sustainable growth.

Tools and Technologies:

• Web Application framework: Zend (based on PHP) & BOP
• Frontend: Yii web application framework
• Mobile API Development: Slim Microframework
• Work management: JIRA (Agile methodology)