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Re-platforming E-Commerce for Scale, Agility, & Connected Experience

For one of USA's largest fireworks retailers, re-platformed website to Shopify Plus in just four months, making e-commerce headless and composable. Now effortlessly serving 250K visitors a day, while affording content creators extreme agility in managing and delivering impactful experiences without relying on IT.

Industry
Retail,
Fireworks
Services
Digital Commerce Transformation,
Solution Architecture,
Software Design and Development,
E-Commerce,
Technology Selection
Platforms
Shopify Plus,
Contentful,
Algolia,
Cloudflare
Business Impact
Agility, Scale, Speed-to-Market

Challenge

One of the USA’s largest fireworks brands was looking to re-platform its e-commerce platform to

  1. Gain agility in managing and delivering engaging experiences through its website, while reducing, if not removing, the content team’s reliance on IT for publishing content.
  2. Reliably and predictably support the massive variance in the scale of their website’s usage due to the highly seasonal nature of their business.
  3. Upgrade their technology stack to, in the future, enable a composable and unified commerce experience across their website, brand stores, and seasonal franchise popup stores and tents.
  4. Achieve the above in a short duration of four months with an immovable timeline leading up to their biggest season of the year, i.e., the 4th of July.

Besides being severely constrained on time, the brand was severely constrained on resources as well. Along with being responsible for the day-to-day operations, its lean IT organization was burdened with several other concurrent transformational projects and did not have the time and resources to research and evaluate process, technology and vendors for this initiative.

Engagement

Initially, GSynergy was informally engaged by the brand’s consulting partner to assess their needs and to acquaint them with the landscape of modern e-commerce solutions. Within the first meeting, GSynergy’s solution architect was able to establish consensus with the brand’s leadership on needs and technological direction for solving immediate and future business needs.

Within four weeks of a follow-on engagement, GSynergy helped the brand put together an architecture using Shopify Plus Hydrogen headless e-commerce platform, Contentful headless CMS, Remix.js server-side rendering for best SEO compatibility, Cloudflare for scale, and Algolia search for relevant search results. GSynergy provided a detailed analysis of functional and operational fit, long-term cost of ownership (acquisition, maintenance and growth), speed to market, extensibility, maintainability and replaceability, as it compared various alternatives including Salesforce and Big Commerce.

GSynergy was then engaged to do the implementation and migration in a very tight timeline of just four months. GSynergy put together a team of three resourceful offshore developers led by a highly experienced onshore project lead and solution architect.

The project was executed using best practices of agile development allowing brand’s IT and business to be engaged early and continuously during development, providing feedback, testing the development, and building content. From the very inception, GSynergy focused on performance testing, brand’s ability to migrate data in bulk, easily and quickly create, version and publish content, test content in preview website on staging and production environments, and test every link from their existing website to ensure existing third party blogs and QR codes on product packaging will continue to work. The team also ensured that all their integrations with their third party services such as accessibility, promotions and popups management, and 3D fireworks show builder were working flawlessly.

Results

The re-platforming project was completed on time and under-budget while exceeding the expectations of the brand.

  • The project was delivered in a very aggressive timeframe of just four months, complete with UAT and performance testing to reliably serve over 10K page requests per second. Within two weeks of launch the website effortlessly scaled to ~250K visitors per day with 10+TB of bandwidth consumption per day.
  • Content creators gained the desired agility in managing and delivering its content to inspire and engage its customers. The content creation team was able to put together the content for the entire website, demonstrate and gain feedback and approval from leadership in a short period of three weeks. This included a complete redesign of the website, its color and component theme, and all its product, promotion and location data, including location data for 1,500+ temporary tents and shacks across the country. Besides being able to create the initial content in such a short timeframe, content creators could now maintain multiple versions of the website content, and publish content on demand or at a predetermined schedules without engaging the IT team.
  • The brand was able to establish the desirable separation of responsibilities between content creators and IT. The IT team could now focus on creation of presentation templates and fixing issues with the overall platform rather than adding and updating content on a tight schedule. The ownership of content creation and publication was easily passed on to then non-technical content creation and marketing teams who could now predictably create and manage the website content.
  • The flexible, headless, composable architecture of the solution allowed the brand to effortlessly integrate with several of its existing services for accessibility, site analytics, chatbot, forms and surveys, and bespoke services for creating custom rich firework shows on their website. The brand was able to very easily integrate their e-gift card fulfillment services such that e-gift cards purchased online would be immediately usable in their stores, thus providing a seamlessly connected commerce experience to its customers.

In the words of the brand’s CIO,

Anuj and his team were true partners, thinking and strategizing as a strong extension of our team, bringing expertise and vision beyond what we could deploy internally. It was clear that they were not only technically competent and skilled time and scope managers, but were proud of jointly developing our public-facing presence within an immovable deadline. Our business is highly seasonal and complex, and together we pulled off what many thought was impossible. Once again [Consulting Partner] has been a great partner in bringing the right people and skills together to deliver success, satisfaction and solid business value.

The brand re-engaged GSynergy's team to enhance their e-commerce stack with abilities such as creating shared favorites lists, Wikipedia like popup glossary for on-screen content, and creating and scheduling promotional tags, popups, banners and splash screens directly from their headless CMS.