Online jeweler and auctioneer Bidz.com Inc. is reaping the rewards of a $1 million overhaul of its e-commerce platform.
In December Bidz.com, No. 74 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, replaced an older legacy e-commerce system with an internally designed platform that runs on an updated Java 2 Enterprise application with Oracle and Microsoft SQL database software.
With the old system, which ran on Linux software, any new major applications had to be manually coded, tested and implemented. Developing a new feature or function for the Bidz.com web site usually took from 30 days to two months to complete.
But with its new system Bidz.com now can design and implement a new application in as soon as one week. “Running an e-commerce platform using open source software meant we weren’t paying a licensing fee, but with an old legacy system built on Linux we also couldn’t build to scale,” says Bidz.com chief technology officer Leon Kuperman. “The new system gives us 10 times the processing capacity we had previously.”
Bidz.com uses its new e-commerce system to maintain records for its registered users and house information related to its sales invoices, cash receipts, auction transactions, inventory control and other historical transaction data. The system also handles all aspects of the auction process, including notifying users via e-mail of an auction’s status.
Bidz.com, which posted web sales of $187 million in 2007, needed a new e-commerce platform to keep pace with new business development and its growing transactions base. In the past year, the number of orders processed each day has grown to about 4,443 transactions, an 18% increase from 3,755 daily orders in 2006. The company also recently launched Buyz.com, a fixed-price jewelry e-commerce site that includes advanced features and functions such as a diamond search and the ability to customize a ring.
With its new system, Bidz.com has reduced by at least 50% the time its takes to design and implement a new site feature or function. “We built the new system to keep pace with the business, which is growing exponentially,” says Kuperman. “With an older legacy system, we needed a two-month time frame to scope out a project, write the business requirements and code, and then go through the implementation and testing. Now our implementation time is down to about two weeks and in some cases we can develop a new feature or function in just one week.”
Back...
