Case Study: Online Retailer Steps up to Meet Growing Business Demands

Shoes.com is an online retailer of footwear and apparel founded in 1996 and headquartered in Vancouver, BC. The company owns and operates Shoes.com, OnlineShoes.com, and Shoeme.ca, and is a part of the Hardy Capital portfolio.

Business Needs

Shoes.com was growing quickly and needed a more efficient way to streamline their web publishing processes. Their overall ecosystem involved an integration between multiple systems to back up their e-commerce platform. Part of their ecosystem was a huge product database managed in two different platforms - Shopify e-commerce and another custom PHP application.

They needed a unified data model in one place with all the core attributes of the products, like descriptions, prices and inventory. They needed to completely replace the existing product information management systems with a single consolidated system that has the ability to integrate with other systems.

Pimcore Solution

Shoes.com was advised to use Pimcore Product Information Management (PIM) System to solve their unique requirements. Pimcore Global Services' team created a data model according to their specific requirements. Various Pimcore event handlers were used to manage the integrations with other systems in place.

The project required migrating core attributes (around 30 fields) of all the products from the existing platforms into Pimcore as well as approximately 3 million records. Once the migration was done, Pimcore Global Services' technical team continued to perform weekly updates to their Pimcore instances, since their teams were still using the existing platforms.

Business Results

With Pimcore’s consolidated platform, Shoes.com is now able to complete up to 6,000 updates every hour. They can update stock, new colors, prices, sales, and product availability and this ensures that product descriptions, prices, and inventory are all accurate. With such consistent updates, shoppers always have the accurate information they need, in order to make an informed purchase. The Pimcore UI was optimized to their unique business processes and allowed for enhanced efficiency. As of today, there are over 3 million records being monitored by Pimcore’s platform.