25 Apr Luxury Fashion Finds Bigger Sales, Returns In Cloud
Net-A-Porter didn’t know how much money it was leaving on the table when the Web site failed to keep up with traffic. New microservices captured it.
Luxury fashion might seem to be an unlikely space to suffer from sudden onslaughts of high traffic, given the non-mass marketing approach that luxury by definition implies. If millions of consumers are involved, then how luxurious can it be?
But the IT staff at Net-A-Porter, a 17-year-old, online retailer of luxury fashion, has found out otherwise. As its following has grown, the London-based firm has found its web site will undergo surges in traffic as it stages sales or specials through the year and on big retailing holidays, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
The Net-A-Porter site normally copes with 70,000 concurrent shoppers, according to figures released in 2014.
When stylish, high-priced goods go on sale, the traffic will surge to 10 times that amount after sale emails and social media notices go out. That may be because Net-A-Porter fashions and prices are “legendary,” and the firm doesn’t build up “a huge amount of stock,” said Robin Glen, lead developer for in-season product, in an interview with InformationWeek. Shoppers try to get the goods while they can, and that usually means in the first six hours of a sale.