Discover how Express gained the flexibility, scalability and speed to compete in the hyper-competitive fashion market

The hyper-competitive world of fashion requires retailers to be agile and nimble. However, in 2018, Express saw signs that its monolith platform was hindering its ability to deliver innovative solutions and experiences that could meet the changing demands of its customers. The company realized that it needed to migrate to a new commerce platform to retain its competitive edge.

Express started to incrementally replace their Oracle ATG platform with headless components, which led them to review the market for a digital commerce solution that fit their new microservices-based vision. This ultimately led them to choose the pioneers of headless commerce: commercetools.  

The company went live with its new commerce system hosted on an AWS cloud infrastructure in 2020. With modern cloud capabilities in place, they were able to achieve 99.999% uptime as well as higher security and availability.

commercetools delivered exactly what Express needed: Flexibility, scalability and speed.

Initially, the most significant benefit the company recognized was that they were able to develop and deploy innovation much faster — going from releasing updates every 2 to 3 months to multiple releases a week. This increased their ability to meet the needs of the business and keep up with market demands.

For example, in the 3 months leading to Black Friday 2020, Express made 5 major changes to their digital experience: Not only was Klarna added for payments, they also added a new version of the BOPIS feature, significantly improved product detail pages, rebranded and restructured their loyalty program and integrated Stylitics, an AI-driven outfitting tool, throughout their site. All of these changes were accomplished with no impact on performance or downtime.

The company also saw dramatic improvement in response times which has led to increased conversions. Jon Mutter, VPCustomer Applications, said that his team ran some tests in Q1 of 2024 with the requirement for the system to process 100,000 orders per minute, equating to 1667 orders per second. The platform successfully passed the test. ”It was very impressive. Even if our peak is extremely high for a minute or less, knowing that commercetools can handle it gives me good peace of mind. At that peak, you don't want to provide a bad experience for your customers.”

Last update, June 2024