The Herculean task of overhauling Sainsbury’s website to reach its goal of doubling annual online sales to £2bn has involved migrating the data of 8 million customer accounts, 4 million credit cards and 12 million orders.
The new site, based on IBM’s WebSphere ecommerce platform, went live in April, but the scale of the revamp has only just been revealed.
The project has been led by digital agency Salmon, which managed more than 10 third parties and the overall programme, and will provide ongoing support. The third parties included Oracle, Endeca, LittleForest, System Concepts, Foviance, Site tagger/Bright tag, BazaarVoice, Acceleration, ClearLeft and ACI.
As well as moving the website, Salmon replatformed eight additional systems at Sainsbury’s, comprising the contact centre, delivery scheduling, delivery management, content management, ratings and reviews, search and navigation and merchandising.
Agency bosses claim this project is one of the first, and largest, grocery implementations on IBM WebSphere Commerce in the world.
The migration was technically challenging, as the site includes features such as support for thousands of simultaneous promotions, calculated real-time in the basket.
Salmon also developed a number of bespoke applications and developed more than 80 integration points to back end systems and the supply chain to support reporting and the supermarket’s entire multichannel offering.
Sainsbury’s digital and technology director Jon Rudoe said: “It’s taken Sainsbury’s 14 years to reach £1bn annual sales online and this new platform gives us the capacity to double this.
“Much of the work by Salmon has focused on improvements ‘behind the screen’ to allow us to build new and exciting functionality that will make the shopping experience better, faster and more efficient for our customers.”
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Sainsbury’s reveals just how Herculean its website overhaul was http://t.co/w1rCWGDlXG #digitalmarketing #directmarketing #CRM #advertising