How to Successfully Launch a Global Fashion Ecommerce Website on Magento 2
As a global brand, creating excellent localized shopping experiences with a complete commerce solution is the key to successfully entering a new international market. From dazzling mobile experiences to personalized content and promotions, creating customer experiences that reflect the uniqueness of your brand is what sets you apart from the competition.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through a recent eCommerce site we built for one of our global fashion clients and uncover best practices you should know in order to stand out from the crowd and launch a successful online storefront on the Magento 2 platform.
Understanding the Challenge
A global fashion label and fast-fashion pioneer needed a new website for the Chinese market. At the time, its existing website was inflexible, and couldn’t accommodate the unique characteristics of the Chinese market. For instance, consumers rely exclusively on their mobile phones and mobile payment apps for shopping, registering with sites, and signing up for services and programs. Additionally, the nature of marketing campaigns in China has changed radically over the past few years. Thirty-minute flash sales are all the rage, and the brand was keen to take advantage of this popular trend. The brand asked Silk to design a website and customer experience that would resonate with Chinese consumers.
The project’s challenges were immense. To begin, for regulatory reasons, the brand needed the site designed, tested, and launched in under six months. The site would also need to accommodate a nearly unprecedented scale. The brand has 10 million active loyalty users, and at any given moment, 10,000 concurrent visitors were on its site. During a flash sale, traffic could easily increase to 12 million visitors — all of whom are looking at the same product.
The loyalty program is essential to the brand, and the marketing team wanted to ensure that each member had access to the promotions and coupons to which they are entitled. Moreover, it’s difficult to use a product configurator from a mobile screen. The brand’s merchandising team wanted the ability to show each color of a garment as a separate item, an approach that would also allow them to place the best-selling colors prominently on the page. These special features would not be available out-of-box from the eCommerce platforms they evaluated and would need to be custom designed.
Building the Solution
The Silk team recommended Magento Commerce 2 because its out-of-box functionality allowed us to speed up development and meet the short timeframe for the project. We also helped the client to identify and focus on the must-have capabilities at launch and develop a pipeline of additional features to be added in future phases. The initial launch required Silk to integrate the brand’s CRM, OMS, and PIM systems with the Magento platform.
To solve the scaling challenges, Silk designed a baseline infrastructure to handle the sizable daily traffic, and a peak infrastructure to support a flash sales-driven spike in traffic. Additionally, the team spent a lot of time optimizing code, particularly in the WeChat API, to ensure seamless customer experiences during the sales.
Silk also built custom iOS and Android apps to accommodate mobile users, as well as a mini program for WeChat to support flash marketing campaigns. We customized the user registration process so that it’s based on mobile phone numbers rather than email addresses. The custom payment process allows customers to select their preferred payment, WeChat or Alipay. QR codes are generated automatically once orders are placed, which customers scan with their payment app. Payment is then confirmed by the mobile app.
Silk enabled the loyalty program discounts by binding individual users with coupons and programs, functionality that isn’t natively supported within Magento Commerce 2 and needed to be built from scratch. Finally, Silk undertook a massive data transformation project to convert configurable products into single products to accommodate the unique merchandising requirements.
Key Features
Custom Development
In addition to developing the site, Silk built a custom iOS app, Android App, and mini-program for WeChat — all in a five-month timeframe.
Flexible Infrastructure
Silk designed a baseline infrastructure to accommodate high volumes of traffic, along with a scaled-up peak infrastructure to handle massive spikes in visits during flash sales.
Custom UX
The customer experience is designed around the mobile user, with registrations based on mobile phone numbers rather than email, and products shown individually, rather than as a configured group.
Quick Launch Success
Silk met this global fast-fashion brand’s need for a quickly delivered website for the Chinese market. Given the large volume of daily traffic, combined with massive spikes during flash sales, Silk designed a baseline infrastructure as well as a peak one to ensure a seamless customer experience. Our team customized every aspect of the user experience around the unique requirements of the localized shoppers. Custom apps, a seamless registration process, and product displays offer maximum convenience and promote purchasing.
The design and build of the new site, iOS app, Android app, and WeChat mini program were all delivered under a quick timeline. The site and the custom apps went live in under six months and now easily accommodate the brand’s daily and flash-sales traffic levels.
Learn More
With the right solution, you can reach new heights as a global brand. Talk to a Silk expert today about building your eCommerce site and growing your business with a quick time to market. To learn more, contact us at 949-748-3700 to get started.