Case Study
A swift launch of an online shopping site for a Japanese fashion retailer to offer a shop-from-home experience
THE CLIENT
The client is a lead retail holding company in the Asia Pacific region.
The company is a well know, casual wear designer, manufacturer, and retailer , present in 25 global markets with more than 2000 plus stores, over 44,000 employees, and $8B in annual revenue and opening their first stores in India in 2019.
In March 2020, they temporarily closed their stores in India due to the COVID pandemic disrupting their overall business roadmap for India. The online store roll-out for India was also not due until the latter half of 2021.
CHALLENGE
Safeguarding business continuity during pandemic times
To ensure business continuity and weather the challenging market conditions triggered by the pandemic, it wanted to immediately pivot to an online strategy, which leverages its existing stores and operational network. The client was looking for an e-commerce solution to make up for the loss of footfall in the physical stores. It was looking at providing a “Shop from Home” experience to its customers to experience the brand. The client was looking at launching the service and the first anniversary of their first store opening within nine weeks.
TRANSFORMATION
Technology enabled custom made solution
UST partnered with the client to set up a cloud-based e-Commerce application with a dedicated team comprising UI/UX Engineers, back-end developers, cloud engineers, and automation engineers. The online store was built on VERA, the omnichannel digital retail platform from UST.
VERA provided:
- Highly flexible order management and fulfillment modules, which are customizable.
- A wide range of integration options - from sophisticated ERP systems to basic spreadsheet-driven operations (to manage catalog, orders, and inventory).
- Automated up-sell/cross-sell on the website with VERA’s trend spotter, complete-the-look, similar items, and virtual fitting room.
The user experience design was done in collaboration with the client, and the solution was developed leveraging UST's proprietary platform. UST NoSkript™ (an AI-powered quality engineering platform) was used to automate the testing of critical business processes, thereby reducing the test cycle effort and duration.
Internal crowdsourced testing was leveraged to validate the shopping site on multiple devices, browsers, screen resolutions, and formats, uncovering 75 unique defects in a 10-hour window. The team was able to close defects ahead of delivery successfully. The solution was hosted on an Amazon Web Services instance with enhanced reliability engineering processes to save cost and improve consumer satisfaction, reducing the response time. The solution also included developing a mobile application for helping the in-store assistants fulfill orders.
IMPACT
Transform the shopping experience
- Launch a “shop-from-home” service supporting 17,000 postal index numbers across India in nine weeks.
- Leveraging the cloud platform enabled a scalable and resilient infrastructure to meet the seasonal demand of the customer. Also, to support in-store assistants for pick, pack, and ship, an app was developed and installed on a handheld device (iPad).
- In the first week of the launch itself, sales doubled.
EXPERTISE & RESOURCES
Discover our resources
Learn more about the expertise and resources that helped us achieve success on this project.
Digital Transformation Services | Digital Technology Solutions - UST
Retail Transformation Services and Technology Solutions | UST