Intelligent Luxury Fashion

Personal touch key to success

The Fifth Collection have found a way to offer a fully technology run eCommerce platform while retaining an approachable and very human element to the shopping experience. Shoppers on the platform interact directly with a member of the team using their live chat function.

“The experience of buying vintage is very personal” – Nejla Matam-Finn, Co-Founder & CEO

Using AI to combat counterfeit products

An issue that plagues the eCommerce industry, and especially fashion e-tailers, is combating counterfeit products. The Fifth Collection is the first to use an artificial intelligence imaging software to ensure the authenticity of all the items sold on the platform.

“It’s easy for a business to talk about authentication, but for long term business sustainability you have to get it right. We have and continue to invest a lot in proprietary knowledge and hard science to verify all of the pieces we sell.” – Michael A. Finn, Co-Founder

The Challenge

Business Goals

• Providing a worldwide eCommerce platform to bring vintage fashion lovers and suppliers together.
• Intuitive management of  suppliers, returns and revenue sharing.
• Vintage like User Experience for web and mobile users.

Technical Challenges

• Single Page Checkout to increase conversion
• Multi currency support
• Recommendation engine to upsell / cross sell
• Management of Customer wishlist
• Faceted search, Narrowing
• Search options which are important to customers
• Option to pay by installments
• Popular Payment gateway integrations
• User interaction analytics and cart abandon recovery
• Multiple Seller Support –  account management (order, inventory and shipping per seller)
• Support for managing Sale and Coupons
• Revenue sharing model for supplier
• Optimizing shipping rates
• Automation of Online Advertising
• Scaling and High Availability to address worldwide customer base

The Solution: Fifth Collection & Spree

Spree Commerce is a highly flexible platform that supports significant customization possibilities. Thanks to it all the challenges were addressed by utilizing and extending core offerings, which involved the following:

• Using powerful RESTful API to create fluid single page checkout workflow for better User Experience.
• Extending community built currency plugin to support USD. SGD, EUR and AUD currencies.
• Building Rule Based powerful recommendation engine based on user interest and checkout history to increase conversion ratio.
• Enabling users to build wishlist to easily navigate items they are interested in without adding to cart. Wish list items are also used to target users with specific product recommendation.
• Extending Spree Commerce core product filters to search by various properties and options like designer, size, color, price range, categories, condition etc
• Integration of Hoolah Payments for Pay by Instalments (only for Singapore)
• Payment integration with Paypal and Stripe
• Building custom extensions to add support for managing suppliers, their inventories, sale, returns and revenue sharing
• Integration with EasyShip to fetch worldwide shipping rates
• Automated workflow to publish products on Google Campaign Management Solutions and Facebook Shopping feeds
• Integration with Google Analytics and CartStack to understand and optimize customer behavior
• Amazon AWS services based architecture for high availability and scalability

Tech Stack:

• Spree Commerce
• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• jQuery
• Amazon AWS

Conclusions:

SPREE SUCCESS STORY

The Fifth Collection is a leading eCommerce platform for carefully curated vintage fashion. It has been awarded as Southeast Asia’s #1 online vintage and preloved luxury fashion site. And it is built with Spree Commerce, a highly flexible platform that supports significant customization possibilities and enables the vintage like User Experience for a very demanding target group of customers that shop for unique luxury goods.

Source:

The Fitfh Collection 

BoTree Technologies

CNBC

Luxury Insider

Crunchbase

Xero