Boyner triples e-commerce performance using Azure, boosting customer engagement and conversion

Boyner Group, with its six group companies, more than 250 stores, e-commerce sites, mobile applications, and more than 8,000 employees, maintains its leadership in the field of store and fashion retail in Türkiye. Boyner relies on advanced technologies to build a flawless omnichannel customer experience.

Challenging IT complexity and cost

Boyner’s Information Technology (IT) department is primary to the company’s operations, ensuring that both internal systems and customer-facing services run smoothly. Yet, Cihan Yıldız, Chief Technology Officer at Boyner, was not certain that the state of Boyner’s technology infrastructure would support its rapid growth. "Our infrastructure was spread between on-premises datacenters and multiple cloud platforms,” he explains. This led to a highly fragmented and complex IT environment that not only increased operational costs, but also introduced significant quality, latency, and performance challenges. “Whenever a customer makes a purchase, they would have to pass through seven datacenters around the world. We needed to consolidate our datacenters to offer a more reliable and stable service to the 21 million registered customers. And for that, after a very transparent tender evaluation, we chose not just a vendor, but a dream partner—Microsoft.”

Boyner had only one critical condition: it required the vendor to provide support during the entire migration project. “We didn't have the internal capacity to do everything ourselves and didn’t want to rely on a third party that might not know the vendor’s solution quite as well,” explains Yıldız.

Microsoft worked closely with Boyner’s IT department to ensure a smooth migration plan was in place. “The Microsoft migration team assumed all responsibility and worked tirelessly to assist us. Together, we migrated all our data to Microsoft Azure and started our digital transformation journey,” shares Yıldız.

Transforming retail with cloud services

Boyner now smoothly manages all its infrastructure on Azure, significantly enhancing its operational efficiency. "We made extensive use of various Azure services, including Azure Application Gateway for load balancing, Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Kubernetes Service for scalability, Azure SQL Managed Instance for service stability, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to keep a lid on our operational costs," details Süleyman Dönmez, System Infrastructure and Network Operations Director at Boyner. “We’ve built a seamless integration within and across Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure OpenAI. We rely on Azure OpenAI Service to enable better production, deployment, and interpretation of data science models,” adds Fulya Tezel, Data Director at Boyner.

Boyner also gained better access to its wealth of data. The retailer’s previous technology stack prevented it from combining structured and unstructured data for analysis. “We have established advanced analytics environments using Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Machine Learning,” shares Sedat Çelik, Data Science Manager at Boyner. “With Azure, we’ve decreased the time it takes to analyze data from eight hours to 10 minutes." This efficiency has significantly accelerated Boyner’s project timelines and enhanced data-driven decision-making processes. “Azure Synapse Analytics brings data to every team across Boyner’s, from e-commerce and customer analytics to digital marketing. Now we can ingest data—from anywhere, in any volume, anytime. We've empowered our data scientists,” adds Tezel.

For instance, Boyner used Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service to configure a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline—a set of automated processes for development and deployment. This enabled Boyner to create and apply machine learning models in production very easily.

“With Azure, we also solved the challenge of Product Information Management (PIM) by using Azure OpenAI Service,” highlights Yıldız. In e-commerce, PIM tends to be a highly manual and labor-intensive task, because each product must be detailed one by one. “Now, once we upload a product photo, the models we developed using Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service detect the product, gather details about it from the internet, and generate product descriptions automatically.”

Besides content managers, the IT department has also eliminated a lot of headaches. Dönmez shares, “We have a clear understanding of our environments and how they function. Creating new environments for our development teams has become a quick and easy task. Our emphasis on automation in Azure has led to a notable increase in our team's productivity, allowing us to spend less time troubleshooting issues and more time improving performance. This shift has resulted in a better overall experience for our administrators, who can now focus on enhancing their skills within a stable working environment.”

Boosting customer engagement and conversion

With a more consolidated infrastructure, machine learning models, and automation, Boyner’s team can manage updates and redesigns more easily, leading to a better user experience. “Following the redesign of our website, not only have we enhanced our capabilities, but also seen that customers spent twice as much time on our platforms.  Customer complaints regarding performance decreased by 50% following the migration, resulting in the lowest complaint numbers in Boyner's recent history,” Yıldız shares. Boyner attributes the rise in customer engagement to the increased performance and speed of the platforms.  Dönmez adds, "With Azure, we’ve doubled if not tripled the performance of our applications. We were able to handle 200,000 transactions per second during our performance tests. We decreased latency by 50% across the networks, all the while decreasing infrastructure costs by 40%, amounting to millions in Turkish Lira." Conversions also increased by 20%, and Boyner saw a 190% rise in revenue from online channels.

With Azure, Boyner can maintain this seamless shopping experience even during peak periods like Black Friday. Dönmez notes, "For example, in 2022, we encountered performance issues with 60,000 customers accessing our app. We quickly addressed this by adding more virtual machines and taking corrective actions. In 2023, everything went smoothly with almost twice the number of visitors. We no longer need to mobilize our IT team to deal with scaling issues.”

Boyner also enhanced its security posture. Before, due to the complex nature of its infrastructure, it was very difficult for its cybersecurity team to identify and solve problems. “Now, the entire infrastructure is in Azure, everything is documented, so we can easily identify where the problem is and solve it more efficiently,” explains Dönmez. “The mean time to solve problems decreased significantly.”

Moving fashion forward

Looking ahead, Boyner is set for more innovation focused on expanding its digital offerings. "Recently, we've started the shopping assistant project. The first phase was creating a chatbot using Azure OpenAI Service, which we completed very quickly," Yıldız describes. “In the next phase, our teams will finish up the learning process and policies for how it will interact with customers.” Additionally, Boyner plans to extend its digital services with its high-performance order and shipping management system, Maestro, aiming to offer it to other retailers in Türkiye and the broader region.

Reflecting on Boyner’s digital transformation journey, Yıldız emphasizes, "Before you start, it’s really important to define the technical requirements, targets, and timelines. The other equally important aspect is the team which makes the dream a reality. We are really happy about partnering with Microsoft, because it not only brought its expertise, but also supported us to make our migration to Azure seamless."