REGIME CHANGE FOR

DRUPAL COMMERCE

PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

BENEFITS

ALL 3 DIGITAL AGENCIES

platform.sh

INTRODUCTION

Wauwaa is a high-end destination providing

content, community, and children’s products

from birth to age six. A start-up with Venture

Capital funding, they formed in 2012 and are

experiencing strong growth, driving

approximately £100,000 per month in 21

countries as of November 2014.

The Drupal Commerce site launched in

November 2013 as an online destination for new

parents and growing families. Today, they

provide over 4,000 products from 124 brands

and are growing rapidly. Their digital marketing

strategy relies on a fast growing Social Media

community that currently stands at over 81,000

and 124,000 registered users. More than 76% of

their traffic is from mobile devices, accounting

for over 64% of their revenue.

Clearly, this business has a strong focus on the

customer engagement cycle in order to attract

diverse customers, deliver an amazing

experience, and retain them as advocates.

PARTNERS

WAUWAA.COM CASE STUDY

URL

www.wauwaa.com

“Our success would not have been nearly

so rapid without Platform.sh, which has

transformed our ability to deliver

important new website features and react

to market conditions. We calculate a

savings of at least 38% since the

introduction of Platform.sh for our

development and production hosting.”

Ivan Lopez

Chief Executive Officer, Wauwaa

38%PROJECT

LIFECYCLE

SAVINGS

THROUGH

PLATFORM.SH HOSTING

CHALLENGE

The project needed both acceleration and cost reduction. Wauwaa constantly experiments with and

iterates its marketing approach, refining and improving targeting, personalization and campaign

messaging. The website is fundamental to this, so bringing forward successive functional phases and

making changes to existing features more quickly translates directly to sales and revenue growth.

The original build took 6 months and 400 man days to deliver, prolonged by iterations of user

requirements, 3 geographically disparate development teams, inconsistent environments and a

complex development and testing process.

Examples of resulting revenue affecting issues include:

Fraud proof discounting functionality that couldn’t be delivered because the testing servers

were booked out for priority work on the mobile theming. Continuing instances of fraud and

the inability to maximize promotional opportunities resulted in significant revenue loss and

lost time from management addressing fraud related issues.

The Facebook campaign that triggered a sales event upon reaching 60,000 ‘likes’. Traffic

was unexpectedly heavy and there was no facility to seamlessly upscale the hosting service

to handle the load, resulting in servers down, revenue loss and reputational damage.

A similar unexpected traffic spike occurred when a new discount was introduced by the

marketing team, causing another outage. The effort associated with the manual

re-provisioning of the extra capacity took a number of hours, resulting in further losses.

PROJECT

To build the primary channel to market their eCommerce engine, Wauwaa works with best-of-breed

design, development and marketing partners in their primary markets across Europe, the US, and

Asia. This strategy has introduced some complications in the flow of new features into the live site:

Synchronizing development efforts across three time zones has introduced significant

additional overhead in terms of Agile team activity, project monitoring, and infrastructure

management.

Synchronizing development to avoid testing slot clashes and merge conflicts between vendors

and scheduling access to multiple testing environments so that related developments could be

merged and tested together has been problematic.

Significant management / cost overhead for multiple sets of environments

Company-wide involvement in release testing.

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Following a successful initial build and delivery by Exove in Finland, Commerce Guys were invited to

design and build further specialist commerce services including accounts, referrals, coupons and

fraud proof discounting.

WAUWAA HAS MADE HUGE DEVELOPMENT COST AND

REVENUE PROTECTION SAVINGS WITH PLATFORM.SH

At the project level, on-boarding new developers and providing 3rd party access now takes just min-

utes. Development, test, staging and production environments require very little systems adminis-

tration or management time as it is mostly automated by Platform.sh. Activities such as branching,

cloning, merging etc. are instantaneous, under developer control, and have zero costs attached to

them. No more time is spent configuring environments, feature development happens in parallel,

testing slots are a thing of the past, conflicts and errors are virtually eliminated to environmental

consistency so everything moving through QA into live just works ! At the business level, the cost of

delivering new features is considerably less and therefore easier to justify. Immediate changes can

be safely made to production to take advantage of micro changes in the marketplace. Proving con-

cepts by quickly building demonstrators and iterating them with marketing and user groups pushes

back the point at which design decisions become irreversible. And most importantly, there are no

more outages as spiking is handled through our non-disruptive scaling architecture.

THE PLATFORM EFFECT – 38% SAVINGS

The comprehensive mix of features and functions required to deliver Content, Community & Com-

merce requires an advanced Continuous Delivery (CD) regime combined with the guarantee of con-

tinuous availability. Drupal plus eCommerce is a more complex system build than most are used to.

As such, many organizations and agencies welcome the expertise Commerce Guys provides in the

areas of design, construction and ongoing management. Platform.sh hosting is our latest addition.

Combined with a 99.99% production uptime SLA, Platform.sh significantly improves the develop-

ment regime, introducing accelerated development, Continuous Integration (CI) for any size of pro-

ject and risk-free CD of features into live environments.

Platform.sh is a fully automated Git-driven development and hosting

PaaS (Platform as a Service) for PHP web applications that manages

not only the entire production infrastructure, but also any number of

development and staging environments. It extends a branch-merge

workflow to infrastructure so that every branch can be tested as if it

were in production, and scales for the largest sites. Using Platform.sh

increases development velocity and virtually eliminates DevOps.