Famous Shoes


Problem
As a fast pace company, Famous Shoes was growing at a very rapid rate. Their old e-shop developed in WooCommerce has outgrown them and couldn't handle the traffic and the requests that it was getting. The company was looking to build a new website in a more robust and scalable system.
Solution
Drupal Commerce as an enterprise CMS is known for its infinite scalability so it was a no brainer. Eventually we developed custom applications for the company's intranet so it was a wise choice.
Client
Year
Services Provided
Technologies Used
Difficulty
Hours
How it was made
Problem Solving
When initially started working on this project, we saw an important issue that needed to be addressed before everything else. The company was growing at such a fast rate that everything designed and developed from that point onward should be designed for scalability and maintainability for a long time.
We chose to go with Drupal commerce since its a robust enterprise CMS system specifically designed to be scalable and secure. We created a custom modular design that could be changed by Famous's marketing division as often as needed. Since the company has special offers all year round and specializes in flash sales, we developed many custom modules to address that. We manage to make marketeers life easier with custom discount scenarios, Facebook competitions and Promos, newsletter subscriptions, customer management and many more.
Customize Some More
The online shop had started to grow only after a few months of rolling out the new design. The company then faced another issue. They needed to spread e-shop sales across all franchise brick and mortar shops. All shops should be able to view online shop orders and be able to notify the e-shop managers of their stock availability for each order. E-shop managers then should have an internal overview of what shops have which shoes and then decide who will ship out each e-shop order, to maintain an even balance in e-shop orders spread out to all franchise shops. It even helped them bring down their shipping costs by choosing the nearest shops where possible.

Scale to infinity
We made sure the website was as user friendly as possible, with clear representation of the shoes pictures and information right where the user needed them. Combine this with the one-page checkout process, it made ordering very easy with as little steps as possible.
We didn't settle there. With clever marketing tactics and offers we made sure we grab our customers attention and help them buy more products by showing them relevant products at the right time. Clever analytics and heatmaps helped us analyse user behavior which in turn gave us data to use on advertising and remarketing to further drive sales.
Growth Needs Horsepower
With rapid growth, came rapid stress to our servers hosting Famous Shoes. We had to deploy a custom private cloud solution with load balancers to ensure SLA of 99.9% and handle all that traffic. This enabled the company to have a good breathing air and could handle practically infinite traffic. Being confident about sudden traffic spikes, they stepped up their game by doing TV advertising. They used famous TV shows to show off their brand and shoes and got vast amounts of traffic (and orders) each time. Our servers coped very well even when serving 1000 concurrent users browsing an e-shop.
The online part of the company grew so large that after less than 2 years they created an in-house team of developers to further move this project forward by doing it all internally.
