HSE24 is the modern brand for lifestyle shopping. Since its beginnings in 1995, the international homeshopping company has always pioneered selling by storytelling: As the first teleshopping channel in Germany, HSE24 took the industry into the e-commerce age in 1998 and is now present on all relevant platforms.
The project at a glance
- Doubling the conversion rate
- Double the speed of Google Page Speed Insights
- Zero downtime deployment
- Daily releases
Initial situation
HSE24 is one of Europe's leading home shopping companies. Ideas are tested and implemented quickly and with little risk in the search for new ways to inspire customers and drive the digitalization of the company. This also applies to the development of a cloud-based digital engagement platform.
HSE24 chose codecentric as a trusted partner to build a digital engagement platform aligned with business objectives. The main goals were:
- Scalability and growth: Innovative business ideas and digital products were to be easily expanded to other countries and markets with the help of a consistent platform, thus reducing organizational effort.
- Higher development speed: Automated processes aimed to help develop and implement new products quickly.
- Customer-centric prioritization of functionality: Data-based evaluation options were intended to help identify and prioritize features that generate maximum customer benefits.
Solution
The digital engagement platform was intended to serve as a scalable and stable basis for the development of new digital products and distribution channels. It was important that existing services could be used flexibly and that they could be easily expanded or enhanced.
A microservice architecture in combination with various AWS services was therefore chosen. This enabled business processes to be implemented within independent services. The combination of DevOps mentality (you build it, you run it) and a cloud-based, fully automated deployment process enabled the development of high-quality software with low frictional losses.
In addition, HSE24 opted for a green-field approach in which the newly developed components are as independent as possible from existing systems. All the required integrations were implemented based on asynchronous communication. Although this path led to the temporary duplication of business logic, the benefits from independent development outweighed the drawbacks.
Autonomous, vertical teams guaranteed short innovation cycles. In addition, a weekly, cross-team development meeting was established to discuss the most important architectural decisions and to exchange ideas.
The development teams presented their progress to all relevant stakeholders in the company in review meetings every two weeks. Early and regular user tests as well as A/B testing enable customer-centric decisions to be made. Customer feedback and actual sales figures are also included in the daily analysis, so that the traffic on the platform can be flexibly scaled and gradually increased.
Result
Within a year, HSE24 built a functioning e-commerce platform in the AWS cloud. The focus is always on high quality demand from all sides.
The combination of modern and established technologies ensured performance, security, scalability, expandability, and maintainability.
The high degree of autonomy and automation, such as a continuous delivery pipeline in the cloud, consumer-driven contract testing, automatic scaling, and alarms has reduced development cycles to a few weeks. New features are now introduced several times a day and prioritized thanks to data-driven evaluation.
Appropriate user tests were used to create an individual shopping experience that is tailored to the needs of customers. After just a few sprints, a microsite was released that doubled the conversion rate and the add-to-cart ratio of social media traffic. The home page, including search and catalog pages, also doubled the rating in Google’s Page Speed Ranking thanks to modern mobile-first web technologies. In addition, the add-to-cart rate increased in the mid-double-digit percentage range for mobile and tablet traffic. All of HSE24's web traffic will be processed via the cloud-based digital engagement platform by the end of 2019.
Holger Stary
Vice President Systems of Engagement, HSE24
When selecting a partner, it was very important for us to hire a service provider who has the technological and methodological experience, but who could also implement the project quickly and efficiently. We found such a partner in codecentric. Together, we implemented a flexible and sustainable state-of-the-art platform in a very short space of time, with which we can continue the HSE24 success story.
Holger Stary
Vice President Systems of Engagement, HSE24
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Stephan Hochhaus