How RS Components created a marketplace for engineers using IBM Garage
Pete Wood, head technology evangelist, RS Components, tells delegates at Computing's Cloud & Infrastructure Summit that they needed an awesome experience for end users quickly and cheaply, whilst not losing quality or resilience
Unless you're an engineer you may not have heard of RS Components, but it is a £1.7bn company which offers over a million products and ships over 50,000 parcels per day. It recently hit its first billion pounds of e-commerce sales.
One of its initiatives was to create a marketplace for its customers - a place where they could interact, share designs and comment on one another's work. Of course the goal was to encourage more sales of its stock, but to be successful community had to work for its members.
"Eight years ago we lanched a community for our customers," began Pete Wood, head technology evangelist at RS Components, speaking at Computing's recent Cloud & Infrastructure Live event.
"It now has 729,000 members globally, made up of engineering professionals, students, startups, all sorts," said Wood. "Based on its success, we looked at the maker market [largely hobbyists designing small tools and various types of device].
"So we created a marketplace. We wanted to attract new makers to the site, get engagement and get new customers. We needed a partner to make it work. We have a third party developer we work with, but we wanted to move faster than they were able. This partner needed to be credible, as we're a big global business.
"We needed someone to help deliver an awesome experience for our users. We wanted value for money, someone with a clear understanding of our requirements, who also has first class hosting and support capabilities.
"Our marketplace gets over one million page views for months, so it also needed to not fall over," he added.
RS Components looked at lots of potential partners, but eventually chose IBM Garage.
"We settled on IBM because of their philosophy, and their Garage was well located for us in Moorgate. We met them, liked what they had, and saw that they're using all the latest ways of getting things quickly to market . We designed an MVP [Minimum Viable Product] as we couldn't do everything we wanted, then used the agile methodology to build a quick prototype.
"We spent an entire day in a room, and mapped out everything we wanted to do. There were lots of post-it notes everywhere. IBM helped us put our concept design together, then we remained in regular contact with them. We did daily standups on video calls for half an hour with them.
"As went through the build, we started using testing to make sure it was what we wanted, then we were bug fixing on the fly. So we quickly took that concept and found we had a solution which was working for us.
"We built the MVP in four weeks, so we used a lot of open source stuff, including an open source marketplace chased ShareTribe, which we modified slightly. Using IBM's managed Kubernetes container service, we deployed in a matter of days to get our first situation up and running."
Wood explained that IBM then helped his organisation with a single sign-in system, so when community members wanted to use the marketplace, they didn't have to enter their credentials all over again.
"IBM Cloud Garage were brilliant, they knew exactly what we wanted, understood our requirements, and helped us bring our ideas to life very quickly. They delivered a credible platform with a great user experience, all on budget and to time," Wood enthused.
With the marketplace up and running, Wood said that his business is now seeing increased traffic from both new and returning customers.
"We now see increased traffic and increased new member acquisition, it's given us a real market differentiation. We also see increased engagement with the maker and professional maker community. We showed it to maker fairs in Newcastle and Rome, and it was very well received at both. We saw increase a real spike in traffic, and our services scaled up elsatically," he added.