Pricerite transforms omni-channel retail experience with OpenStack Cloud
This leading home furnishing retail in Hong Kong scales up its public cloud to give its customers a seamless and consistent digital shopping journey.
Our customer
Pricerite Home Ltd. is the largest home furnishing retailer in Hong Kong, and the first to build an expanding omni-channel retail network. The brand offers comprehensive smart home solutions and is dedicated to improving the quality of life of its customers and helping them better use their living spaces.
Pricerite aims to reform the traditional furniture retail industry by offering customers a seamless and consistent shopping experience. The company’s mission is to become the top-of-mind, one-stop home furnishing ecommerce retailer in Hong Kong.
“The Rackspace team is resourceful and responsive, with a fast turnaround time and great recommendations and guidance.”
The obstacles they faced
Pricerite knows that web stability and performance are critical to the omni-channel shopping experience, as well as the success of the company’s ecommerce business. In the past, Pricerite’s ecommerce servers were not optimized to take full advantage of cloud hosting.
According to said Derek Ng, Chief Executive Officer, “The servers were neither flexible nor fast enough to scale up our e-business. More importantly, the Magento platform was not supported with sufficient Magneto expertise, undermining the server performance.”
What’s more, Pricerite wanted to concentrate on its business strength — providing the best home furnishing solutions to its customers — and leave technical challenges to the IT professionals. The company also needed access to experts with in-depth knowledge of the Magento platform that Pricerite uses, and around-the-clock access to support to help ensure a consistently high-performing ecommerce site.
“Rackspace was able to diagnose our issues quickly and enable us to resume normal business almost instantly. They are truly an extension of our team.”
How we helped
The expertise and experience Rackspace has had managing Magento led to Pricerite’s decision to choose the technology service provider as its cloud partner. “They’re the number one hosting provider for Magento applications, specializing in preconfigured, tested environments based on years of best-practice learnings,” said Ng. “Rackspace provides dedicated expertise.”
Together Pricerite, Rackspace and SILK worked on several critical projects to achieve the high levels of performance in Pricerite’s ecommerce platform — and overcome its website stability and availability issues.
Dong Xu, President of SILK Software Group said, “We understood that Pricerite’s biggest issue was that their programming architecture barely sustained its business growth, which led to a series of issues, such as an unstable operating system and unsatisfied customers. Our team provided a complete ecommerce solution based on Magento and allocated our system onto Rackspace’s hosting sever.”
SILK handles the application while Rackspace handles the infrastructure on which the application runs. “SILK software is a global independent digital agency that creates and maintains critical websites on behalf of customers,” said Tien Ngo, Head of Operations at Rackspace Asia. “They provide expertise with Magento, as does Rackspace. We have partnered together to create an ecommerce platform for Pricerite.”
Through optimization of Pricerite’s Magento platform and integration with SILK, Rackspace provided a seamless online shopping experience for the company’s retail customers.
What we achieved together
Pricerite and Rackspace managed the task of moving mission-critical applications and data from a local cloud-hosting company to OpenStack® Public Cloud. Ngo said Rackspace Managed Operations is best suited to help Pricerite achieve its goals to provide seamless shopping experiences for all. “This is our top-tier service level on the public cloud,” he said.
When Pricerite partnered with Rackspace, it was trying to overcome performance issues seen on its previous ecommerce environment. “The purpose of engaging Rackspace was to find a way to help improve the availability and overall performance on the Magento ecommerce platform,” Ngo said.
Rackspace also helped Pricerite reduce computing resources by optimizing the cloud’s scalability and flexibility. This resulted in a 25% reduction in infrastructure costs. “More importantly, Rackspace helped us fine-tune our server configuration and boost loading performance by more than 100%,” Ng said.
Pricerite also needed the flexibility to increase resource capacity at will. “Once Pricerite decided to move to Rackspace, we immediately identified the performance issues they had inherited from the old environment,” said Ngo.
The new multi-channel solution on Magento integrates online and offline information across product information management (PIM), user experience (UX), points of sale (POS) and membership systems. This helps to simplify shopping processes and data management for Pricerite, and gives customers seamless omni-channel shopping journeys, including better product information, store location information, online purchase and checkout processes, and order tracking.
Rackspace support has had a positive role in helping Pricerite meet its goals, especially in critical situations. “Their skills and services have also added extra value to our customers’ browsing experience when they visit our online shop,” said Ng.
He added that Rackspace’s experience in supporting the Magento platform has helped them identify the root cause of problems and provide solutions within a short period of time. For example, on one occasion, the company’s online store encountered significantly reduced page-loading performance. Pricerite asked Rackspace for a diagnosis and solution. The company had been affected by two search engine crawlers. Thanks to 24x7x365 access to Fanatical Support®, the issue was solved quickly, helping Pricerite resume normal business operations almost instantly.
“Rackspace is truly an extension of our team, enabling us to focus on our ecommerce operation,” said Ng. The relationship between Pricerite, Rackspace and SILK is strong. To further develop its omni-channel experience, Pricerite is planning to launch an ecommerce application.
“Rackspace is definitely our partner of choice for strengthening our omni-channel retail network to ensure that customers enjoy a pleasant shopping journey,” said Ng.
Pricerite’s omni-channel offerings run smoothly, allowing the retailer to focus on its core business of supplying customers in Hong Kong with a wide selection of furniture and household items.
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is a hybrid, multicloud solutions expert. We combine our expertise with the world’s leading technologies — across AI, applications, data and security — to deliver end-to-end solutions. We have a proven record of advising customers based on their business challenges, designing solutions that scale, building and managing those solutions, and optimizing returns into the future. As a global hybrid, multicloud technology services pioneer, we deliver innovative capabilities to help customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency and create incredible experiences. Named a best place to work, year after year according to Fortune, Forbes and Glassdoor, we attract and develop world-class talent to deliver the best expertise to our customers. Everything we do is wrapped in Fanatical Experience® — our obsession with customer success that drives us to help each customer work faster, smarter and stay ahead of what’s next.
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