Replacements.com boosts its online offering to more than 1 million products

Fine china retailer Replacements Ltd. has made its entire inventory of 1 million SKUs available for purchase online for the first time this year, using an e-commerce application that its own technicians wrote in-house. The result: Replacements’ online sales volume jumped five-fold this year, without a corresponding increase in web costs. Nearly half of Replacements’ $68 million in annual sales--$32 million--takes place online now. The balance of orders are mostly through Replacements’ call center.

Replacements’ tech staff wrote the supporting application internally using open source scripting language, vice president of Internet sales and marketing Jack Whitley tells InternetRetailer.com. Replacements’ IT staff wrote the base application over a period of about six weeks and spent another six weeks loading up the data to e-commerce enable 175,000 china, silver and crystal patterns. Previously, most of the patterns could not be purchased directly online and required customers to place orders via a toll-free number. “It’s cost us very little to roll this functionality out,” Whitley says. “We developed this application internally so we own it. There are no proprietary fees or maintenance and support costs.”

Further, Whitley says, the applications do not require Replacements to run a database server or an application server on its site. That’s because Replacements wrote the supporting java script application to function on the customer side, essentially, letting the customer’s computer do the order processing, Whitley explains. Applications that run on a merchant’s server may result in hundreds of thousands of simultaneous requests to the server, risking overload in peak times, says Whitley. Replacements’ application is written so that the customer’s computer pulls requested data out of a web page already downloaded to the customer’s computer, without writing that request back to Replacements`server. “That means no matter how many people are accessing the site at one time, there is not going to be overload on the server. It’s a distributed way to get this done,” he says.