With the mission to surpass the quality of greeting cards available on the high street, Moonpig has leveraged the power of technology to customize and personalize cards since its inception in 2000. At that time, Moonpig built its own eCommerce platform, which oversaw everything from the frontend and dispatching to the printing of greeting cards.
As time passed, this homegrown monolithic platform became increasingly inflexible, making it challenging for the retailer to introduce new features to a sophisticated customer experience. Technical debt began to accumulate, leading to heightened maintenance efforts and longer development cycles. This, in turn, negatively impacted time to market and competitive advantage as developers had to regularly shift their focus from value-adding tasks to bug fixing and monitoring issues.
Furthermore, handling the company’s rapidly growing online traffic and order volumes with an older, homegrown platform became progressively harder as Moonpig’s website and eCommerce platform were hosted in its own managed on-premise infrastructure which used all the rack space available. “When you’ve got high volumes of traffic during peak periods, one of the things that’s really important to manage this traffic is scaling; and that was one of the issues that we’ve experienced: Not being able to scale in a way that was predictable and especially cost-effective,” said Suchema Oyetey, VP of Engineering at Moonpig
With the vision to become the ultimate gifting companion, building everything from scratch was no longer a viable solution. In order to succeed, Moonpig needed flexible eCommerce technology and a build-and-buy approach to accelerate time to value.
Choosing a composable approach to reset its eCommerce platform, Moonpig started to break down its monolithic platform into bite-sized, more easily manageable components. As a result, the company was able to identify the functions that genuinely distinguish them from competitors (and could be built in-house) and those that don’t (which could be bought from a best-of-breed provider). Following this path, Moonpig customized its tech stack with a mix of in-house-built applications and best-of-breed solutions, including commercetools Composable Commerce for B2C, Adyen for payments and Contentful for CMS.
With the company growing at remarkable speed, adopting cloud-native SaaS and serverless architecture was vital for Moonpig to handle sales peaks, such as Christmas time and Mother’s Day, without a hitch. Hosted on AWS, the company can now auto-scale capacity even as it doubles traffic almost every year. “Now, we essentially have everything running in the cloud. Everything runs on AWS, everything scales uniformly and seamlessly because everything is serverless. And, I can't state enough, the importance of building in a way that allows you to scale in a cost-effective fashion,” said Suchema.
The flexibility of composable commerce also enabled the company to reduce time to market for new features. For instance, Moonpig created a mobile app to tailor customer journeys and recommend products, as well as launched AI-powered features to help customers write messages, rolled out video messages and introduced Moonpig Plus, a loyalty program. With a composable engine, Moonpig can accelerate the release of features, as well as make them available for a particular market —or launch them across its five locales simultaneously.
The biggest thing that's happened since we adopted composable commerce has been the speed we’ve had in terms of being able to build and release features to our customers. We’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of features that we release per week, per month and per year — and that in itself is a driver of growth. Thanks to smooth integration with commercetools, we’ve also been able to improve time to value, significantly.
VP of Engineering, Moonpig
Since embracing composable commerce, Moonpig has reaped a bounty of benefits. For starters, innovation has skyrocketed as the tech team can experiment at a faster rate, run A/B tests and harness data to understand what features best resonate with customers.
Not only has the company enhanced its ability to incorporate customer feedback into product development, but it also accelerated time to market from idea to production.
Working with modern technologies also impacted the developer experience and talent retention at Moonpig. Now, technical teams can drive innovation without hassle and see the fruits of their labor generating value for the company.
Last but certainly not least, a composable commerce platform that unifies all Moonpig brands can continue to deliver the hyper-personalized customer experience across all markets, empowering the company to shoot for the moon to achieve its vision, without compromise.
Supports auto-scaling in the cloud to meet growing demand cost-effectively.
A best-of-breed solution to flexibly select and integrate the most optimal features for each aspect of the business.
Enables a wide range of touchpoints and features that delight customers.
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