Analysis: How Shop Direct came back from its golden quarter IT meltdown

In a world where up to 80% of purchase journeys involve online at some stage, losing website availability over the peak period is as bad as closing a flagship’s doors the Saturday before Christmas.

But while website availability has become crucial for retailers, even the biggest can falter.

Two years ago, Shop Direct’s websites went down for up to three hours on four separate dates across November and December.

Since then, the focus for the IT team has been to improve the availability of the site, making sure that everything runs smoothly – not just for shoppers but for the staff using the systems.

Shop Direct head of service assurance Jo Fitzpatrick says: “Two years ago we were a very reactive service organisation. We were really good at recovery, but not so good at preventing incidents. Two years ago during our first big peak, the website was unavailable at critical times.”

Several measures were put in place to stop that happening again. The first was careful planning – Fitzpatrick says this starts in January for Shop Direct’s IT team.

“We take a look at how successful we were, where our issues were and what the risks are for the next 12 months. There’s a programme of activity with key partners and a programme of phased changes so we are ready for the next peak,” she says.

Coping with demand

In addition to planning, the team has pushed through changes to the retailer’s technology infrastructure that are helping it to cope better with high demand.

The etailer’s IT director Andy Wolfe says moving the web platform into the cloud has helped. “We moved to Amazon Web Services, and it means we can carry on taking demand if we have back-end issues,” he says.

The business also migrated to IBM data centres and worked on stability issues. “We had problems with storage in the past,” Wolfe says.

“We’ve also had a lot of investment in the front-end but we have a lot of legacy back-end systems that are old, in containment until we invest in them. We spent time on making them more resilient.”

Changing the culture and working practices of the technology team also required attention.

A large part of making the website more robust meant making sure the IT team worked more closely with the rest of the business. Fitzpatrick says: “We asked ourselves what it feels like for the business when they lose critical applications – the tools they need to do their jobs.”

Members of the IT team now work with specific parts of the business. Whether it’s a warehouse or contact centre, individual IT experts work with each team throughout the year, learning the way they work and giving them a direct point of contact.

“Through the year we work with trading teams asking how we can support them at peak. Two or three years ago they phoned a random person on the IT team, now they have people out there learning about the job during the year. They know what it’s impacting business-wise. They can suggest workarounds.”

Wolfe says that the team’s success is now also measured in different ways. “One of the big changes in IT in the last 12 months is that we’ve been shifting away from system measures and trying to break those systems into business processes. It gives the IT team a better idea of the value they’re creating.”

The result of all that work meant that last Christmas Shop Direct’s availability reached 100%, up from 57% the year before. However, it came at a cost – the team found it was necessary to put a freeze on all changes to the site during the golden quarter.

Fitzpatrick says: “We have to have some kind of control of change in the peak period. Change is a risk and you want to de-risk your golden quarter as much as possible.”

“We had to take quite a heavy-handed approach as we started thinking about change quite late on. Over the key period we had no changes, we restricted A/B testing and projects going live after peak.”

Reacting to competitors

While the change freeze in itself was successful in that it increased availability, parts of the business said it caused problems because it meant they couldn’t react quickly to competitors.

This year, the aim is to retain the high level of web availability while also allowing more flexibility.

Fitzpatrick says: “This year we started thinking about the change freeze in January and we have planned our project portfolio much more around it. We’ve done some work to separate testing environments from production so we can now do testing throughout.”

“We have worked really hard to shore up infrastructure”

Andy Wolfe, Shop Direct

With the growing use of a user experience lab by Shop Direct’s ecommerce team, experimentation and change are becoming central to how the retailer works.

“We are working to understand experimentation a lot more and how we keep some control of change. We will have 70 experiments through peak this year,” Fitzpatrick says.

Wolfe says: “It’s a testament to a journey we’ve been on in the last 12 months. We have worked really hard to shore up infrastructure so we are confident we can apply change to it. Last year, we were not confident in it.”

He adds there are changes every year that the team needs to deal with – for instance, 2013 was the first time that Black Friday made a significant impact for many UK retailers, and Shop Direct was one of the businesses with the most activity around the day.

Wolfe says: “We had discounts every hour – it was really successful but we hadn’t planned for it. It was a very different pattern of peaks, when promotions were released.”

The series of peaks over Christmas have changed dramatically over the past couple of years for the whole retail sector. Whereas shoppers often used to focus their shopping on one particular day, now there is a series of smaller peaks that retailers must deal with and it is harder to predict when they will be.

Cyber team

Shop Direct is well prepared, however. It has a cyber team on hand during the busiest week, and the IT team has worked closely with the business to understand what is in store for Black Friday today.

The pace is not likely to let up in January. Shop Direct has big plans for its personalisation programme, which it has been working on for the past year. Early in the new year, Wolfe says the main gallery page on websites will be personalised for each shopper, based on what they’ve purchased and browsed in the past.

If a shopper searches for dresses, the gallery page will show her the normal selection available on the site. She will be able to filter that using a “for you” option, which will show her a selection of dresses that Shop Direct’s algorithms think she will like.

The retailer is piloting the service at the moment and Wolfe says the aim is to roll it out quickly in the new year. It is building the system with software developer Sas and is cleaning up the quality of its data at present.

Whether it is personalisation, robust site performance or management of change, Shop Direct is stepping up to some of the most pertinent challenges retailers face today.