Large eCommerce digital transformation.

BIG W is one of Australia's leading retailers, with a focus on family and value. They have a high-traffic website which complements their large in-store network. Their online eCommerce was powered by a large, monolithic system, which had a high cost and slow pace of change. A key issue was that system changes for staff in-store impacted customers, and vice-versa.  

To remain competitive in the market and achieve their scaling goals, they wanted to re-architect their systems to decouple dependencies and offer an upgraded eCommerce experience to shoppers.

What We Did

Architecture
Solution design
Collaborative UX/UI Design
Web development
API Design
API and Backend development
System Integration
End-to-end performance optimisation

Website

BigW.COM.AU

The opportunity

BIG W's website, eCommerce site and order management software were powered by a monolithic platform. This was limiting their business in making changes for the different audiences of the platform, including customers, staff and system integrations.  To resolve this challenge, they wanted to re-architect their systems to enabling change to their business without system changes impacting other initiatives and users.

The solution

Upgrowth worked with BIG W to develop a transition strategy to open up their current platform to enable an incremental transformation. The strategy included:

Producing APIs for their current platform to expose existing business behaviour
Delivering a new customer-facing website leveraging these APIs
Extracting essential business functions from the existing platform, enabling development in isolation without impacting business-as-usual (BAU) processes

The results

400,000

Daily visitors

150,000

Pages on site

100,000

Products in catalogue

30,000

Co-current visitors

150k

Pages on site

100k

Products in catalogue

30k

Concurrent visitors

Design System

We developed a refreshed design language and design system with the in-house teams. This introduced brand cohesion, modularity and reuse the product teams had not achieved before.

Problem / Solution Fit

The initiative was rolled out to a small trial group of internal staff to ensure that the functions worked as expected and the experience was satisfactory at an early stage. We incorporated feedback from this process, and it allowed stakeholders to build confidence in the outcomes ahead of a full launch.

Product / Market Fit

Both the new and old platforms were run for weeks in parallel to ensure a smooth transition. Specific cohorts of customers were introduced to the new experience in an incremental fashion.  

This enabled customer feedback to be acquired at scale prior to a full 'go-live' and allowed the complex platform interactions to be monitored with increasing load over time. This approach also built confidence across stakeholders and the wider business.