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Customer Story

Xebia Puts The Sting Back Into the Driver’s Seat with Revamped E-Commerce Platform

Cloud-based platform gives The Sting flexibility to experiment, while reducing costs and time-to-market
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Related services
Software Development

Industry
Retail

Company
Xebia

The Sting is a multi-brand store founded in 1982 by Herman Franzen. The retailer offers its own brands, such as Distrikt Women, Miss America, Required and Lost Minds to men and women. In addition to the Netherlands, the retailer has branches in Belgium, Germany and England. 

In 2013, its webshop was launched, enabling customers to find their favorite brands at the touch of a button. With a growing amount of purchases made in webshops, The Sting needed to create a future-proof e-commerce strategy and platform.
Why
Drive online sales of The Sting’s diverse brands with more efficiency
What
A single go-to e-commerce platform
How
Building a multi-brand cloud-based e-commerce platform

Maximum Platform Efficiency and Flexibility to Grow Customer Loyalty and Sales

The Sting’s old Hybris platform was no longer scaling to the company’s needs. It couldn’t create new brand webshops, quickly iterate on the design or functionality of current stores, and it was expensive. Instead of using a single system, they duplicated the original architecture for new stores, increasing maintenance and costs. It was time for a new and improved architecture.

To enable The Sting to offer its brands through store-specific webshops with minimum maintenance, and increased flexibility and efficiency, Xebia built a state-of-the-art e-commerce platform on top of a modern IT stack. They also coached The Sting to adopt an Agile approach, resulting in shorter lead times and more adaptability.

A Single Streamlined Platform for The Sting

Xebia helped The Sting to create a new modern React application, built upon functional, scalable, component-based architecture. It delivers a front-end codebase and can be used to run various distinct brand webshops on a single platform. The platform also uses a consistent and maintainable source code, covered by unit and end-to-end tests. The platform development focused on mobile and performance so that it works fast on both desktop and mobile.

The new platform saves time and money by lowering development and hosting costs, while significantly improving customer experience. The results are sustainable because Xebia trained a team of The Sting’s employees to maintain and improve the platform to meet future needs.

"The Xebia team keeps us sharp and innovative. With the help of Xebia, over the years, we have managed to build a great platform on which several tenants can live."

Logo The Sting
Michelle Audiffred Product owner e-commerce at The Sting

Leveraging the Latest Smart, Cloud-based Tech for a Smooth User Experience

Xebia built The Sting’s new platform on top of Lightbend’s Lagom microservices framework. This model reduces the interdependency of services while allowing all services to communicate over a message bus. The application uses many modern tools, like Jest, Cypress, and Chromatic, for the unit, end-to-end, and visual regression tests to maintain code quality and stability. Xebia also helped set up a CircleCI, so that code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production.

Its infrastructure is now entirely cloud-native, leveraging the power of Google Cloud and Kubernetes to guarantee uptime with a small team. The solution ensures short release cycles and reduces TTM from months to days.

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