A Story of Site Stability, International Scalability and Record-Smashing Online Sales

LUSH is a leading global bath, body, skin and hair care company. They’re devoted to creating fresh, ethically-sourced, cruelty-free, vegetarian, handmade, low-waste, and effective products. 

With LUSH’s in-store sales far outweighing online, LUSH needed a scalable digital experience that would perform reliably during pivotal sales events, while showcasing the best of the LUSH brand. After the launch, the new LUSH website realised dramatic spikes in both web traffic and online sales. Website sessions increased by 75%, digital orders increased by a whopping 64%, and shopping cart abandonment decreased by 16%. 

At a glance

LUSH runs only one sale each year, which takes place on Boxing Day. In the year prior to our engagement, LUSH’s site was unable to handle the high volume of traffic—such as 12,000 users trying to check out at the same time—and crashed, causing LUSH to miss out on huge online sales profits. This, plus the need for a digital presence that would adequately serve their loyal customer base, led LUSH to seek out a vendor to build a new digital platform that would be capable of serving them every day of the year. 
 

LUSH’s primary concern was to have a site that would be able to handle the heavy traffic loads that come with its sole annual sale. Additionally, because LUSH is a global company, they also asked us to deliver a high-availability commerce platform with the ability to spin up local country shops. LUSH wanted to allow each country to make adjustments and translations to its content, as well as ensuring consistent data flow and business intelligence reporting throughout all instances. 

After thorough discovery, including reviewing the LUSH’s existing code, the structure and architecture of the site was assessed. From there, it was on to planning and implementing a scalable solution that could handle spikes and surges in traffic. 

 
We planned and built a cloud-based digital experience platform to allow users to easily and securely make purchases and payments, across web and mobile devices. A Cloudflare caching layer was implemented to reduce demands on the servers, which helped handle users’ frequent page refreshing for price changes during the sale. A high availability queue system was implemented for synchronisation of orders and data between systems, making it easy for users to file and track transactions across devices. 

The new eCommerce platform we built was able to quadruple the number of orders compared to the previous year. 

 
The site had been prepared for the previous year’s traffic, but it received more than double the projected number of hits. After a few modifications, the updated site performed beautifully. Ultimately, 90% of all products that were available for discounted purchase online were sold out, and the sale (and digital platform) was declared a success. 

 
The new platform could support up to 100 different markets and supported 17 different countries and their localized sub-sites. Though information was easily shared across different sub-sites and the platforms all worked together, the site architecture was built so that each sub-site performed independently of the others—meaning huge surges in traffic from Germany would not disrupt operations in New Zealand. 

 
This was one of the largest and most complex Drupal commerce sites in the world, with nine different Drupal profiles working together and exchanging data across this international platform.