Marks & Spencer (MnS) has set up its online business on the Amazon platform. With the increasing adoption of online shopping as the main channel for purchasing products, MnS saw potential to acquire new customers and increase order volume. However, it was facing challenges operating efficiently on the Amazon platform; hence, it decided to build an in-house enterprise e-commerce platform to manage its online omnichannel business
I was part of a larger team of more than 150 software development members, spanning multiple vendors across the UK and India. I worked as an Engineering Manager out of the London office, taking care of catalog management and the search and discovery team. Key members were working out of the London office, while the major work was done out of the India office
Some of Key factors to move out of Amazon platform
Discoverability of MnS products on the Amazon platform
Cost of setup, maintenance, and change requests on Amazon
Speed of execution of business changes on the Amazon platform
Speed of setting up a new product line and a new business
Depreciation of brand value
Coexisting with competitors on the same platform
Mandate to build an in-house team to maintain a business edge over competitors
Work with product owners and business owners to identify use cases for catalog, search, relevance, and discoverability of products.
Prioritize the use cases for iterative development.
Design a catalog data structure that suits the sales catalog, making sure that the design is in line with performance and latency requirements.
Design and develop a workbench for the catalog and content management team to upload catalog content, which includes data, images, parent-child relationships, upsell, and cross-sell information.
Provision the Solr search engine for search and retrieval of products and other assets.
Customize the catalog and Solr engine to suit M&S’s business needs.
Conduct performance testing of the catalog and Solr engine setup.
Provision a relevancy engine for the recommendation of upsell and cross-sell products.
Ownership of planning, execution, testing, and delivery of the catalog and search engines.
Integrate the catalog and search engine with other systems, such as the order management system
