Big Data and eCommerce

Case-study: Cools.com. A platform that transforms the way people shop for the cool.

Data infrastructure

Personal data

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The Challenge

Online fashion shopping is a complex industry: multiple sophisticated competitors, tight price competition, an overwhelming number of products, and ever changing consumer preferences. One of the greatest eCommerce challenges is to be up-to-date and deliver reliable holistic data integration, as well as attract, impress and engage customers.

Cools.com stands out among its peers as a Big Data eCommerce start-up working with Chanel, Fendi, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs and other world famous brands. The company provides exclusive opportunities to customers, has received investments from MTV and media moguls.

“We need to ensure we can maintain the existing services through support and through stable BAU incremental development. With this in mind, and at the same time, we are working to develop the services, website, Ingestion Tool and CRM – for the COOLS vision.” – says Anton Gething, COO at COOLS.

The service supports over 3 million products via multiple Affiliate Programs and Brand partnerships. Which are now categorized into tertiary levels and are updated daily with our custom built mapping + parsing tool. Products are then made accessible on the company website through ElasticSearch with dynamic application of 8 filters by category, color, brand, price, size, relevance and etc.

What we did

With a large, multi-discipline operation team, the product owner and merchandising team worked closely with our Skein team to design a seamless team integration that would support revolutionary technology innovation. Two of our Python developers, one front-end developer, three AngularJS developers, and a project manager worked alongside the Cools.com team.

01. TEAM INTEGRATION STAGE

With the core team located in New York and the development team in Kyiv, it was very important to establish regular communication, daily stand-ups and shared project management space in Podio to synchronise strategy, marketing and technology.

02. ANALYTICS AND TECHNICAL REVIEW

At the planning stage the Skein team explored and evaluated the legacy technology, which included combining template and custom code and outdated Big Data codebase. We prepared a plan for implementing the ingestion and CRM and CMS modules and rewrote all of the system components.

03. DEVELOPMENT

“It is a simple task to make things complex, but a complex task to make them simple” – Meyer’s Law.

While deploying cutting edge UX / UI trends as part of the Visual First approach, we also built a micro-service architecture encapsulating massive server side processes. We’re able to manipulate millions of products, mapping them via user-friendly interface and at a great speed, allowing a continuous feed delivery to web users.

TECHNOLOGY STACK

Python 3.4 (Falcon) ElasticSearch MongoDB RethinkDB JavaScript (AngularjS 1.5) git Docker

Results

Cools successfully released the product, and they continue to experience explosive double-digit annual growth. Most recently, Cools raised a Series A investment round. Now the company works with New York Fashion week and is preparing to expand internationally.

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