Omnichannel e-commerce platform for an electronics retailer

A consumer electronics retailer with 140 stores across Vietnam saw that most customers researched products online before visiting a store, yet its website and point-of-sale systems behaved like two separate businesses. Prices, stock levels and promotions often differed from one channel to another, eroding customer trust and costing store staff time in explanations.

The challenge

The old website slowed down every sale season and once had to suspend orders on the busiest day of the year. Inventory synced only once a night, so around 9% of online orders were cancelled because the item was out of stock. The marketing team needed three to four days to push a new promotion to every channel. Leadership wanted one platform where a product, its price and its availability were defined once and shown consistently everywhere.

Our solution

• Headless commerce architecture: a single business layer serving the website, the app and in-store screens, with a React front end rendered on the server for speed.
• Real-time inventory aggregated from 140 stores and three central warehouses with under five seconds of latency, enabling buy online, pick up in store.
• Elasticsearch-based search that understands Vietnamese typed without diacritics, typos and the everyday names customers use for products.
• Central promotion engine that lets marketers configure campaigns themselves and publish them to every channel at once.
• Load testing before each peak season at five times real traffic, combined with autoscaling on cloud infrastructure.

Results

The platform went live after eight months and has since handled four peak shopping seasons without a major incident.

• Online revenue up 68% in the first year.
• Out-of-stock cancellations down from 9% to 1.2%.
• Average mobile page load time of 1.6 seconds.
• 31% of online orders now collected in store, driving extra add-on sales at the counter.
• Promotions published across all channels in under an hour.
• Loyalty programme grown to 5.6 million members.

Because the business layer is shared, new channels are now far cheaper to add. The retailer has since launched in-store kiosks and a business-to-business ordering portal on the same platform, each in under eight weeks, and its in-house team handles most front-end changes without outside help. Zentrova still runs performance engineering ahead of every major sale.

Our customers now see the same price and the same stock figure whether they are on the app or standing in one of our stores. — Head of E-commerce, client company