Business background
Remarkable Commerce creates bespoke, high-performance eCommerce platforms for retail customers, including Ben Sherman, Moss Bros and M&Co. Being able to scale its cloud-based architecture for customers while they encounter heavy, unpredictable traffic on Black Friday and quickly rectifying issues before they lead to downtime are crucial to the business’ success.
The challenge
Before partnering with Hyve, Remarkable had to add new dedicated servers to cope with the spike in traffic on Black Friday each year. This had huge cost and resource implications and made scalability a weeks’ long challenge. If downtime occurred, the company had to wait for long periods to speak to engineers.
The negative impact on Remarkable’s customers was significant, with some of them losing up to 10,000 orders a day due to cloud downtime, hefty delays, and potential customers stuck in long, virtual queues. Remarkable felt they didn’t get the support they deserved. They were left with hefty delays when experiencing downtime with no real input to improve their platform performance.
The solution
To effectively manage the surge in customer traffic during peak retail periods like Black Friday, Remarkable Commerce switched to a bespoke Hyve private cloud solution. We virtualised Remarkable’s infrastructure, allowing it to dynamically scale its cloud resources up and down before, during, and after periods of heavy traffic. New virtual servers are dynamically added to support big increases in visitors and then removed again once the volume of website visitors begins to decrease in the days and weeks after Black Friday.
We also collaborate with Remarkable directly to regularly perform stress tests in the run up to Black Friday for accurate resource planning. Hyve is actively engaged around-the-clock in monitoring the servers, even after resource levels have been increased. In setting alert thresholds for the servers, if Remarkable Commerce’s website encounters an unprecedented surge in traffic, we can proactively allocate additional resources, while the cloud setup gives Remarkable full visibility of performance, helping them to accurately plan ahead.
The benefits
There is a direct correlation between site speed and conversion rate in eCommerce. In 2022, despite a 43% increase in new users on Black Friday compared to 2021, Hyve’s cloud solution and round-the-clock engineer support allowed Remarkable to dynamically scale resources and instantly rectify any unexpected issues. Together with Hyve, Remarkable completely eliminated virtual queues for its customers, leading to an 89% increase in successful transactions on Black Friday compared to the three weeks before the annual retail event.
Bradlie Houldsworth, sales and strategy director at Remarkable Commerce, said:
“Our high-performance commerce platforms enable mid-sized retailers to compete on a level playing field with larger rivals – but only if our cloud solution can handle similar amounts of traffic during their busiest and most lucrative periods. Hyve’s cloud technology gives us the confidence to scale our resources to meet demand and, most importantly, it gives our clients peace of mind that they can focus on driving an unlimited amount of marketing traffic to their online storefronts without spending time worrying about it crippling under pressure.”
Details originally published in our Press Release with Remarkable.
