Helping an international ecommerce brand deliver at scale

Our client is a global ecommerce brand that has helped revolutionise the way people shop for furniture and home decor over the last 20 years. Through its network of branded retail websites, it sells household items from many thousands of suppliers to more than 25 million active customers around the world. 

This business is much more than just an online retailer. It employs many thousands of people across Europe, Asia and North America, and its large-format last-mile delivery facility rivals that of Amazon, allowing it to offer fast free shipping on many items. Sold and unsold stock is held in millions of square metres of multi-function warehouse space, and its volume is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years.

Staff at the business’s geographically scattered sites were using multiple applications to manage processes and the hand-offs between them. This disjointed mix of tools cost valuable time, and meant the end-to-end delivery process was not as fast and efficient as it could be. The business needed to explore options for streamlined technical solutions with a merged user interface (UI). As well as improving efficiency and enabling scale, new technology would optimise user experience, cut costs and improve customer satisfaction.

esynergy was selected by the company to draw up recommendations for the organisation’s streamlined technological future, focusing on processes and teams as well as tools. We were invited to analyse options for a single design framework, and recommend short-, medium- and long-term solutions for business process teams, operations teams, tech teams and other key parties. We were also asked to draw up illustrative business cases for our final viable recommendations.

Our approach: Understanding business need

Discovery is a vital stage of any project, but it was absolutely central to this engagement. We had to really understand business need right across this huge organisation, and then use that understanding to assess technology needs.

We interviewed numerous stakeholders, staff and experts within the ecommerce giant, including:

The conversational style of our interviews allowed us to fully explore users’ experiences and their journey to date, so we could get to know their dependencies and constraints.

These interviews gave us invaluable insight into our client’s organisational structure, and how value is delivered within it. It also helped us understand associate roles, operational strategy and processes, and then assess and analyse how different technologies would fit in and help all teams deliver.

Crucially, our interviews ensured we understood the existing technical infrastructure used by our client’s teams. We learned about how it had evolved, what was working well, and where the challenges lay. We looked for patterns and themes across these insights to help inform our analysis.

Our impact: Delivering tech excellence and expertise  

Following interviews and research, esynergy set out our analysis in a report. We also produced illustrative business cases for the two viable recommendations.

Our recommendations were developed by our team of market-leading technology experts, in collaboration with the client’s internal teams. We focused on recommending a single design framework that would enable richer API contracts between fulfilment and delivery, and bring increased compatibility and fungibility to technology and processes for our client.

Ultimately, our recommendations will enable our client to streamline its processes, deliver on its promise to serve its customers quickly and efficiently, and continue to scale its business.