Building blocks of a next-generation eCommerce solution

With the unparalleled growth of eCommerce, customers can now complete their eCommerce journey faster than it takes to pay at a brick-and-mortar store. An industry-leading omnichannel approach means customers expect to order what they need and get what they ordered every time. These two goals put pressure on existing systems; it is necessary to respond quickly and know the stock levels and availability of the entire range of products to meet the high expectations of today’s customers. 

A key aspect of every last mile journey and every eCommerce solution is the delivery time window. The goal is to allow users to choose to receive goods at a time most convenient to them. For us, this meant providing the broadest flexibility to the customer, while ensuring a delivery will be possible at the given time.

Posedio developed a rule-based system that allowed the customer to define time-window slots and make them available to customers. The slots can be configured using a back-office frontend and are validated for consistency to minimize the risk of misconfiguration.

This provides a performant, near real-time access to delivery slots data, allowing for accurate capacity planning and ensuring customer satisfaction through timely deliveries.

To manage the different delivery slots, streamline capacity planning and manage replacement articles from a single place, Posedio developed a modular UI based on the client’s corporate design principles. The system centralizes common concern such as authentication and navigation, while allowing teams to build their own domain-specific UI components.

This approach allowed teams to quickly launch new features and fulfil business needs without the hassle of reimplementing common functionality or waiting for dependencies between deployments.

“With AlloyDB and Posedio, we were able to onboard over 20 services, improving the productivity of more than 40 developers and providing a better, faster and more satisfying experience to our customers in Central and Eastern Europe.” – Markus Mayr-Lechner (Cluster Lead eCommerce)

“There were two major problems we faced. The first one comes from the nature of big projects – getting multiple teams to work together effectively. The second is at the root of all retail operations; we need to support two fundamentally different workflows. We need to quickly respond to transactions while running intensive analytical queries to get more insights into the inventory and customer preferences. AlloyDB is the solution to both of those problems!” – Günter Schwabe (CPO eCommerce Platform)

“We were already working with Postgres on Google Cloud SQL to implement transactional workflows. Once Google launched AlloyDB we quickly noticed it bridges the gap between transactional and analytics behavior in ecommerce processes.” – Markus Mayr-Lechner (Cluster Lead eCommerce)

Results

To ensure the reliability and performance of the eCommerce solution, Posedio designed and delivered a service that enabled business monitoring rules to trigger alerts on deviating order states.

The goal of the system is to be able to warn about potential issues of an order in real time and give hints about the responsible service to contact for further investigation/fixes.

By formulating and monitoring the business rules of the order lifecycle, the process be can better understood, documented and, as a result, optimized.

Posedio built an unintrusive system that was able to, without modification of existing services, monitor the state of the eCommerce solution and maintain consistency, alert on irregularities, and provide critical business insight into the distributed microservices-based system.