Surfdome chose Spree to keep pace with its fast moving action sports multi-vendor marketplace
Europe’s premier action sports and lifestyle retailer
SPREE SUCCESS STORY
Founded by Justin Stone in 2005, Surfdome grew rapidly from humble beginnings to being the leading board sports lifestyle multi-vendor marketplace in Europe with over 25 million annual visitors to its website and serving more than 1 million customers a year.
The company now stocks more than 10,500 product lines across activities from surfing to skating and ships to over 60 countries across the world. Surfdome operates from both London and a 100,000 sq ft warehouse in Northamptonshire. A team of seasoned surf, snow and skate experts curate 300 of the world’s best brands and offer a first class experience, communicating with customers and delivering goods 7 days a week.
A cloud-first strategy
Surfdome has experienced rapid growth since it was established 10 years ago. To continue this momentum and support future international growth, the company decided to transform its entire E-commerce infrastructure. This meant moving away from the legacy technology it had traditionally used and investing in a cloud-first strategy.
Surfdome moved the bulk of its E-commerce infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and selected open source tools to provide search, analytics and data visualization.
Surfdome & Spree Commerce
The Challenge
Online retailer Surfdome had been running for 10 years with a technology platform that was beginning to show its age. Without taking positive steps towards evolving its technical landscape to something more reliable, maintainable, and faster to innovate on, it was clear that it would struggle to keep pace with a fast moving marketplace.
The Solution
- Replace large parts of a legacy platform without disruption to Business as Usual
- Evolve to a modern software architecture that enables faster, more reliable change
- Reduce the cost and time of change by over 50%
This was achieved by migrating from internal PHP systems to Ruby on Rails using Spree Commerce on budget and schedule. As well as by creating and launching a full responsive checkout, a mobile website and rebuilt most of the business support tools (PIM, OMS, WMS, CMS).
Tech Stack:
- new OMS in (Spree Commerce, Ruby on Rails)
- new HUB to support all communication (Wombat)
- new store API (Spree Commerce, Ruby on Rails)
- new Storefront (Node+Dynamo)
- new CMS (Contentful)
Integrations:
Conclusions:
SPREE SUCCESS STORY
Surfdome is Europe’s premier action sports and lifestyle multi-vendor marketplace. Headquartered in the UK, the company stocks more than 10,500 product lines from 300 of the world’s best brands. It has experienced rapid growth since it was established 10 years ago and needed a new reliable, maintainable, and faster to innovate on solution to keep pace with the fast growing global marketplace for board sports lovers. Spree Commerce and Ruby on Rails proved to be the perfect answer for Surfdome’s needs.
Vendo lets you launch within a few weeks a fully featured lifestyle or wellness multi vendor marketplace with an unlimited number of SKUs from as many vendors as you can effectively onboard. Start selling quickly, test the market with your product catalog and category tree, get some feedback, adjust your platform accordingly and scale up when needed.