DataArt & Price Shoes Case Study

Client

Based in Mexico and founded in 1996, Price Shoes is a leading retailer boasting the largest footwear and clothing collection in the world. Price Shoes operates 17 large retail stores, 22 community stores, and over 170,000 m² (1.8 million ft²) of warehouse space.

Price Shoes’ strength lies in its affiliate network. This +800,000 strong network is comprised of individuals who leverage Price Shoes warehouse facilities and purchasing power to add secondary or tertiary sources of income for their families. By providing affiliates with merchandise and lines of credit, Price Shoes gives them opportunities for self-employment and the ability to improve their standard of living. The company supports its affiliates via its e-commerce website, its mobile apps, and its call center.

Challenge

Price Shoes built its e-commerce business on Magento, a leading open-source e-commerce acquired by Adobe in 2018. Magento provides multiple capabilities that have suited Price Shoes very well. At the beginning of 2020, most Price Shoes’ sales were driven by printed catalogs and fulfilled in retail and community stores, with web and mobile complementing the offering.

However, the Covid-19 pandemic created significant opportunities – and pressure – for Price Shoes to quickly scale the web and mobile channels. In addition, Price Shoes was in the process of expanding into new markets in Latin America and the United States.

Very soon, this rapid expansion in the Price Shoes’ business made it clear that the underlying Magento-powered e-commerce platform needed to be enhanced to support this growth:

• Magento, being a monolith system, served all the needs of the Price Shoes’ business, including the e-commerce website. In practice, that meant that the database was queried almost all the time. As more and more customers were using the Price Shoes website, pages were taking longer and longer to load, leading to a less-than-ideal customer experience and the scaling options were limited.
• The performance of business support features, like customer support, ERP, and analytics, was also being impacted due to the main database being overburdened.
• With engagement through the mobile channel rapidly growing as well, Price Shoes saw an opportunity to dramatically improve customer experience by modernizing the mobile apps.
• Customization capabilities were also limited on Magento, and the Price Shoes’ core business system required modernization and adaptability in a rapidly changing environment.

Solution

As a provider of technology consulting services to Price Shoes, DataArt put together a team with the specific skillsets to address this challenge.

The team was able to trace the performance problems to the exponential growth of the number of requests hitting the monolith Magento application. Replacing Magento completely, which powered Price Shoes’ entire core business and back-office operations, would of course not be feasible.

Working together with the client, DataArt engineering team designed a process to gradually convert the monolith into a set of microservices leveraging event-driven architecture and native AWS services.

The main e-commerce website, which was Magento, was rebuilt from scratch using Next.js and ReactJS, and Magento APIs were replaced with new backend services. Mobile apps were built using React Native. The product catalog was replicated to an Elasticsearch cluster running on EC2 instances, offloading product search capabilities from the Magento APIs and the main database. This enabled the development of new features, increased performance, and improved scalability and availability of the solution.

The new e-commerce website and backend services were built using containers, leveraging AWS ECR for container image management and AWS EKS for container management and orchestration. AWS Cognito was leveraged to provide secure authentication for the users of the website, and eventually of the revamped mobile application as well.

Product images, originally also stored in the main database, were moved into a private S3 bucket and used a third-party service for generating image thumbnails, compression, caching, and delivery. Website performance was further optimized by using AWS CloudFront (the AWS native content distribution network). Other services leveraged for the solution included AWS Lambda, SQS, SNS, and DynamoDB.

As a result, the Magento database was still preserved as the source of truth, while the performance bottlenecks were eliminated.

From an initial design to the first production release, the entire project took 7 months to be implemented. The overhauled mobile apps for iOS and Android were released 4 months later.

Technology

Outcomes

• The solution dramatically improved the performance of the website and later the mobile apps. Page load times were reduced to sub-second responses and complete page loads of far less than 1 second.
• The increase in performance, coupled with upgraded security, allowed Price Shoes to emphasize the app and website over the printed catalog with its affiliates. The mobile apps in particular enabled the cultural shift. Engagements on the website and mobile apps significantly increased by 130%.
• By June 2022, Price Shoes’ sales had topped their entire 2021 sales figures. While the sales skyrocketed, delivery times to affiliates were reduced by almost 60% (from seven to three days on average). Best of all, the number of call center support tickets was reduced by 80%.
• The business agility provided by the new cloud-driven solution is now allowing Price Shoes to integrate technologies previously deemed too difficult. These include integrating with a CRM system, and the WhatsApp messaging platform for even tighter integration with its affiliates.