Future Shop
Canada's Top Consumer Electronics Retailer Increases Online Merchandising Agility
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Company Overview
Future Shop is a wholly owned division of Best Buy Canada, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy Company (NYSE: BBY). With 8,000 employees and just under CDN$2 billion in revenues for fiscal year 2001, Future Shop is Canada's largest and fastest-growing retailer of consumer electronic products. Along with 100 stores across the country, Future Shop operates Canada's third most popular e-commerce Web site at www.futureshop.ca. The site receives an average of 54,000 unique visitors and 1,000,000 page views per day.
Business Challenge
In 1998, Future Shop launched its online retail presence using a solution based on Solaris and Oracle. Two years later, to minimize costs and achieve the scalability required to support continued rapid growth, the company switched to the Microsoft platform-the Windows 2000 Server operating system with Internet Information Services version 5.0, SQL Server version 7.0, and Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition. A short time later, Future Shop upgraded to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to further improve database performance and scalability.
Prior to the migration, Future Shop spent close to six months customizing the solution to meet its needs. Most of the work was related to accommodating a much broader range of promotions than Site Server supported out of the box. "Over 75 percent of the visitors to our Web site intend to purchase in-store, so consistency between the two experiences is an absolute must," says Bob Pearson, Group Product Manager for E-Commerce at Future Shop. "To harmonize with retail operations, our Web site needs to handle every type of promotion we run in our physical stores, including percentage-off discounts, mail-in rebates, bundles, linked cross-sells, and shipping promotions."
Even with these custom capabilities, remaining synchronized with the company's weekly print advertising cycle placed a heavy load on Future Shop's online merchandisers. Implementing new promotions still required assistance from Future Shop's information technology (IT) staff, and maintaining a large amount of custom code was a significant burden on the company's software developers. "We wanted to move away from maintaining reams of custom code and closer to an out-of-the-box solution," says Peter Wuerr, E-Commerce Software Development Manager at Future Shop. "Our goal was to find a solution with the required promotional features already built in, along with a tool set that would enable business users to be more agile and self-sufficient."
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Solution
To address these issues, Future Shop upgraded from Microsoft Site Server to Commerce Server 2000. Using the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, and with the assistance of Microsoft Consulting Services and EDS Canada, the entire project was completed in just three months. "The prebuilt functionality in Commerce Server significantly reduced the time required to bring our new solution to market," says Wuerr. "It provides more new capabilities out of the box than we were able to create with six months of custom development."
"EDS worked closely with Microsoft Consulting Services and Future Shop as a single team to provide not only Commerce Server 2000 development, but also e-commerce planning, project management, process definition, testing, infrastructure architecture and support," says Andy Blenkarn, Vice President of EDS Canada Inc. "This ensured that Future Shop received the maximum return on its investment."
Future Shop's online commerce solution is based on the scalable n-tier architecture supported by the Microsoft platform. The Web and business logic tiers reside on six four-processor Compaq DL580 servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Commerce Server, with each server containing 2 GB of RAM. Scaling out in this manner (using a cluster of smaller servers rather than a one large one) eliminates the possibility of a single server failure impacting site availability and enables Future Shop to avoid purchasing additional processing capacity until it is needed. "We can increase site capacity in as little as one day using the scale-out approach supported by the Microsoft platform-simply by adding one or more additional cost-effective, industry-standard servers," says Wayne Chow, the company's Manager of Technical Services for E-Commerce.
Most of the business-logic tier functionality in the new solution is provided by Commerce Server. Several new or improved features in Commerce Server that helped Future Shop to enhance its online commerce capabilities include:
| • | Profile System. The Commerce Server Profile System is a set of schemas and meta-schemas for representing common entities such as users and organizations. The flexible nature of the Profile System enabled Future Shop to access existing custom data structures using built-in Commerce Server user profile objects, making it easy to add additional profile attributes where needed. |
| • | Targeting System. The Commerce Server Targeting System facilitates the selection and delivery of content according to a set of business rules. It is capable of integrating with the Profile System to target users based on specific profile attributes. Future Shop is using the content selection framework built into the Targeting System to cross-sell products based on a user's location in the catalog hierarchy. |
| • | Business Process Pipeline. The Commerce Server Business Process Pipeline is a framework for modeling common commerce processes such shopping-cart management and checkout. "The Business Process Pipeline provides a good jump start for developers," says Wuerr. "It made integrating third-party components for credit-card processing and fraud detection very easy, and has proven to be very reliable and scalable." |
| • | Business Desk. The Commerce Server Business Desk is a Web-based tool that enables Future Shop's business users to perform common tasks such as managing marketing campaigns and updating product data-tasks that would otherwise require IT intervention. "The Commerce Server Business Desk has been a great success from both a business and technical perspective," says Wuerr. "Through the Business Desk, we're entirely self-sufficient producing and maintaining all types of promotions, testing our changes, and pushing them out to the production environment. Business users enjoy full control over the merchandising behavior of the site, leaving developers with more time to focus on projects that add new functionality and thus create additional value." |
The database tier of Future Shop's solution resides on two Compaq R6800 eight-processor servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition, with each server containing 4 GB of RAM. Integration with Future Shop's UNIX-based merchandising and order management systems is achieved using a bidirectional, real-time link based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) and SQL Server 2000 Data Transformation Services (DTS).
To maximize availability, the database servers are configured in an active-active cluster using Microsoft Cluster Services. Under normal conditions, one node of the cluster provides full-text search capabilities and handles membership information, while the other node supports catalog browsing and transaction processing. If either node fails, the other automatically picks up its workload until the problem can be diagnosed and repaired. "Microsoft Cluster Services are very reliable and help to maximize customer satisfaction by keeping the site running smoothly in the event of a hardware failure," says Chow. "The fact that clustering capabilities are fully integrated into the Microsoft platform helps to keep things simple."
Business Benefits
According to Pearson, the greatest benefit of upgrading to Microsoft Commerce Server is increased merchandising efficiency, as provided by the Commerce Server Business Desk. "With Commerce Server, we're much more efficient in keeping online promotions synchronized with those in our physical stores," he says. "Changes that used to require developer assistance are now made by business users in as little as four minutes. We have 10 times the number of SKUs as we did two years ago, yet we're able to manage them with half the effort."
Another new capability enjoyed by Pearson's team is the ability to make changes and push them immediately to the live site. "Being able to take changes live immediately enables us to be first-to-market with new offers and promotions," he says. "When Microsoft announced its price reduction for the Xbox, we experienced a huge spike in interest on both our Web site and in our retail stores. Using the Business Desk, we immediately adjusted the price and took the change live. Had we been unable to do so, many shoppers would have seen the old price and gone to a competitor to make their purchase. In the past, we would have been forced to wait a day for the new price to propagate from our in-store merchandising system to our Web site."
The new solution also is benefiting Future Shop's IT team. Eliminating the need for technical assistance in managing promotions will help to minimize development costs, as will reducing the amount of custom code to be maintained. Site performance and scalability has improved, which will help to minimize future hardware costs as Future Shop's online popularity continues to grow. "Site traffic on our Web site is still growing year over year-by 60 percent in the first half of 2002," says Pearson. "The improved performance, manageability, and scalability provided by Commerce Server will aid us minimizing the hardware and manpower required to support this growth."
Summary
By upgrading to Microsoft Commerce Server, Future Shop increased its online merchandising agility and minimized the costs associated with maintaining a comprehensive e-commerce presence. As a result, the company is better able to deliver a consistent consumer experience across all marketing channels: print, online, and in-store. "Our ultimate goal is to influence the consumer to buy from Future Shop, regardless of whether they purchase online or in one of our retail stores," says Wuerr. "Commerce Server 2000 helps us reach this goal by increasing our ability to deliver a consistent value proposition across all customer touch points."
For More Information
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