The Client

In the ever-evolving online retail landscape, Lasoo (part of IVE Group) stands out as a pioneer dedicated to making shopping more innovative and rewarding for Australians. With a singular goal to help users save time and money, Lasoo provides a comprehensive platform that simplifies the shopping journey. From groceries to fashion, electronics to health products, Lasoo offers an extensive array of daily promotions, empowering Australian shoppers to make informed decisions and seize the best deals. At the core of Lasoo's ethos is the commitment to creating a seamless and enriching shopping experience, ensuring customer satisfaction remains paramount.

The Challenge

However, the road to success is challenging. As Lasoo's popularity surged and user engagement skyrocketed, challenges in website performance emerged. The overwhelming influx of traffic often led to performance bottlenecks, hampering user experience and impacting conversion rates. The contention on the system meant there was a delay between the ecommerce system software updates in the backend and changes being displayed on the storefront, resulting in potential price and availability miss-matching. To overcome this obstacle and ensure their commitment to an exceptional shopping experience, Lasoo sought a solution to enhance their website's performance and scalability. 

The Solution

Collaborating closely with Lasoo, V2 Digital embarked on a journey engineering a solution to tackle the performance issue head-on. By conducting a comprehensive well-architected review of the platform and services leveraging the native Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud stack, V2 Digital identified a key hurdle: a deluge of unnecessary downstream service requests that hindered efficient scaling and caused customer errors with the system with too many serverless instances trying to connect to the database. Leveraging their event-driven development proficiency, V2 Digital proposed and executed a strategy to streamline these requests through batching to improve performance.

The combination of delivering streamlined requests through Lambda improvements and placing the AWS Aurora Proxy as an intermediary has enabled the product system to scale and significantly reduce the processing time of Lasoo’s product ingestion to near real-time.

The crux of the solution lay in optimising the code quality and architecting a system that allowed for efficient batching of downstream service calls. The outcome was remarkable—by implementing the solution, Lasoo witnessed a staggering 90% reduction in downstream calls during catalogue ingestion, database connection issues went to 0 and allowing the scale has meant that we see the ingestion queue has moved to 0. This strategic overhaul translated into a tangible boost in operational efficiency, resulting in a significant drop in service contention. The collaboration with V2 Digital enabled Lasoo to harness the full potential of its platform's capabilities while ensuring a seamless and swift shopping experience for its users.

The Business Outcomes

The impact of V2 Digital's collaboration extended far beyond performance enhancement. The alignment of Lasoo's vision with V2 Digital's experience led to transformative results:

Decreased Operational Costs and Increased Performance: As a result of optimised database utilisation leveraging the native AWS cloud stack, Lasoo experienced a 20% reduction in database usage, decreasing operational costs. Additionally, this optimised utilisation enabled Lasoo to maintain a reasonable capacity buffer, increasing performance and reliability.

Accommodate Growing User Demands: With a streamlined flow of requests and reduced service contention, Lasoo's platform gained enhanced scalability, reliability and stability to accommodate growing user demands.  The time taken to update a product has significantly improved, going from an average of 12,000 unprocessed product updates during a one hour period to near real-time updates, averaging just 0.3 unprocessed updates. This improvement in accuracy not only accommodates growing demand but also delivers a seamless customer experience.

Ensuring Dependable Shopping Experiences: Through strategic technical enhancements, Lasoo's platform achieved heightened robustness and reduced vulnerabilities, delivering a dependable shopping experience.

Conclusion

The partnership between Lasoo and V2 Digital exemplifies the power of collaboration and innovation. Through a meticulous review and strategic changes, V2 Digital enabled Lasoo to address its performance challenges head-on. This transformation not only streamlined operations but fortified Lasoo's position as a leader in the online retail landscape. As Lasoo continues its growth journey, V2 Digital's technical expertise and solutions-driven approach remain instrumental in driving sustainable success.

A Testament to Success

Rob Draper, Chief Executive Officer, Lasoo 

Working with V2 Digital's experienced consultants has been a game changer for Lasoo. We've already seen an improvement in site performance, and as a result, the periods where our systems were under strain have reduced. The team at V2 Digital was fantastic to work with. They embraced a collaborative approach and helped us to solve our site performance issues. We were able to launch the updates seamlessly and could not be more pleased with the results. We're thankful to have found such a reliable partner.

In the dynamic world of online retail, challenges are opportunities waiting to be harnessed. Through collaboration, innovation, and a shared commitment to excellence, Lasoo and V2 Digital have demonstrated how challenges can be transformed into stepping stones to scaling successfully.