24 multiCHANNEL
GARDEN CENTRE TAKES TO THE CLOUD
Scotsdales, one of the uK’s largest independent garden centres, has implemented the cloud-based OpSuite retail system from Davidson richards to manage its multichannel business across its two sites. By installing the low cost, cloud- based system from the microsoft retail management System (rmS) partner, Scotsdales will be able to control and integrate its retail operations and pricing, and launch ongoing promotions that include a new loyalty scheme to compete with other suppliers, supermarkets and online websites such asamazon. the new OpSuite system will enable
Scotsdales’ management to monitor the company’s increasingly complex operations, which include a garden design service, a pet shop and events hosting, from anywhere, at any time and maintain consistency of pricing, while implementing retail promotions spanning both sites. in addition, OpSuite is always open and ready to connect to third- party owned business
applications.this will allow alternative sales platforms such as the online store to be fused into the solution in the future. “We needed to update our ageing
retail management system and the OpSuite cloud-based solution allowed us to implement a state-of-the-art retail solution without major capital expenditure,” commented Ben rayner, Scotsdales director. it will allow us to make real savings for the customers who respond to our promotions or join our loyalty scheme.”
SHOPPING SITE BUILDS ON THE CLOUD
F
antasy Shopper, a new start-up that
is ‘gamifying’ the shopping experience, has built its growing business on amazon Web Services (aWS). it was important
to have the capacity and scale to support its business from day one, as players discover and share the latest retailers within a gaming environment. the
www.fantasyshopper.com website
has seen an increase in their user base by 200% month-on-month, with members spending an average of 28 minutes on the site per visit. Based in Exeter, Daniel Noz, Fantasy Shopper co-founder and chief technology officer told Retail Technology how the company is able to use the cloud to run their business from almost any location. “We started off with one server and
are now running several elastic clusters in different availability zones to guarantee availability,” he said. “the option to up and downscale on demand matches our requirements running a social shopping platform that needs to handle a constantly increasing and unpredictable number of users.”
aWS has
played a big part in the Fantasy Shopper success story, Noz added. “if your market changes, you have to be able to adapt as quickly as possible. running a technology star tup in the cloud teaches you
to focus on scalability and failover from the very beginning,” he explained. “With aWS, you reduce the risk that a growing user base slows you down because your platform can’t handle the load any more. You have also got the option to scale your resources across the globe with low latency and high data transfer, which immediately results in improved customer satisfaction. Winning the aWS Startup competition
in 2011 as the first European Star tup also opened up many oppor tunities for Fantasy Shopper. Noz added: “Our goal is to grow our user base to exciting levels. We have designed our software to horizontally scale and we can be confident with aWS’ elastic provisioning that we can add more instances as we require. With cloudfront and S3 handling, the image serving will scale to any levels alongside our auto- scaled application servers.”
high Street shoe retailer SOlE|traDEr has introduced ipads into all of its uK stores using a private Wi-Fi network from retail communications provider Vodat
international.the new system enables SOlE|traDEr to securely process transactions through the store checkout as well as online, giving customers immediate access to both instore and online stock. the meraki Wi-Fi network, supplied by Vodat, connects the instore ipads to twinmar’s network, which in turn enables secure payment transactions so customer card data is not sent via public Wi-Fi.
RETAIL TECHNOLOGY march/april 2013
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