NA-KD: Building a scalable, international ecommerce platform

About the Project

NA-KD is a leading international ecommerce platform with on-trend women's clothing. As the platform gained popularity, NA-KD was looking for a trusted technology partner to answer growing consultancy and development needs. With relevant ecommerce experience, NoA Ignite was just the right fit to deliver results leveraging a data driven approach.

Challenge

NA-KD was looking to support their existing technical team working on an international ecommerce platform based on Optimizely solutions, with additional brain power. It was important to enhance the consultancy and development capabilities of the team, with particular focus on high-quality deliverables.

NA-KD was keen to increase the scalability and efficiency of their existing solution. It was essential to further tap into the benefits provided by the Optimizely ecosystem, in order to optimize ecommerce processes, deliver a smooth user experience and ultimately to facilitate growth and further development of platform’s core features and functionalities.

Our approach

To best respond to NA-KD’s challenges, we have built a dedicated project team with relevant experience in international ecommerce strategy and solutions. We joined an existing team that was already on board and supported ongoing development with additional skills and talent.

During our cooperation, we shared our ideas for improvement and encouraged NA-KD to introduce solutions that would boost scalability, efficiency and sustainability of their existing international ecommerce platform.

Thanks to business and technical cooperation between experts at NA-KD and NoA, NA-KD increased the velocity of development of their core platform in a significant way. The stakeholders were able to better leverage innovative tech solutions, and thus take the platform to the next level.

Deliveries

Our team was involved in consulting and developing an evolving variety of features and technical aspects of NA-KD’s ecommerce platform, which influenced and shaped our deliveries. We tailored the results of our work according to current business and technical needs of the customer, and adapted on the go.

We delivered results in the following areas:

Optimizations and testing

• Migrating of AB testing tools to Optimizely AB testing, full stack experimentation toolset
• Optimizing product search pages
• Delivering test and quality assurance services
• Providing support in developing checkout processes

Sustainability

• Delivering features enhancing sustainability in fashion
• Introduction of a new customer-to-customer business model

Integrations

• Building an API that integrates the international ecommerce platform with a mobile app
• Integrating the ecommerce platform with third party data providers and Sign with Apple

Other

• Consulting on moving from monolithic architecture towards innovative architecture based on microservices
• Delivering features using best CI/CD MS Azure DevOps practices

The outcomes

Data driven decision making

As a result, NA-KD was able to shift their business towards leveraging a more data-driven decision making approach. For example, by migrating the A/B testing tool to Optimizely Full Stack Experimentation, we streamlined processes related to testing and optimizing various elements of the platform, designing campaigns, landing pages, process flows etc. This enabled NA-KD to leverage data to derive meaningful insights and base strategic decisions on facts and information.

Sustainability in fashion

The outcomes of our work were also related to delivering features that support the sustainability trends in fashion. These features help NA-KD’ customers understand important aspects about the product, such as its background, environmental friendliness, how ECO each product is or what materials were used to produce it.

Another line of features delivered by our dedicated product team and NoA’s consultants was related to facilitating opening of a new customer-to-customer business funnel. With the new user-centric Circle Platform, customers are able to sell used and returned products bought on the core international ecommerce platform. This further enhances the sustainability trend by reducing the amount of cloth waste.

Focus on mobile

Our project team worked on building an API that integrated the platform with its mobile version. The mobile application was an important part of NA-KD’s business model, since the majority of the traffic was on mobile devices. The app introduces additional features related to customer satisfaction and retention and has more notification- and personalisation-based functionalities. Since the core and the mobile platforms were developed simultaneously, it was crucial to connect them at the back-end.

High-quality results

A significant part of outcomes is related to testing and quality assurance. Since NA-KD ships products to customers based in 120 countries, the amount of possibilities to test related to a choice of features, markets, currencies or languages is literally endless. With that scale of a platform, proper testing of the checkout process was crucial. This task required not only an in-depth knowledge and understanding of how the platform works, but also close cooperation between the testing and the development teams.

Our testing approach was very analytical and methodical. We carefully verified each new feature added from the perspective of both the platform as well as user experience. Our testing strategy combined both manual tests with automated testing to verify the API integration between mobile and desktop platforms.

Prepare for future growth

On top of that, we were involved in consulting and development work related to checkout processes or optimizing search results based on filters, products, search history and autofill features. We consulted on technical innovations such as migrating the ecommerce platform from existing, monolithic architecture towards microservices. Also, our dedicated team supported NA-KD with integrating their ecommerce platform with external partners and third party service providers such as Klarna, Adyen or Bamborra.

All of the outcomes above were delivered based on best Continuous Integration/Continuous Development practices with MS Azure DevOps pipelines and tools. That directly translated into increased speed, control and flexibility of development work.