The Challenge
Northbridge Retail, a home and lifestyle retailer with 42 stores and a growing online business, was running on a heavily customised monolithic storefront that had accreted seven years of patches. Page loads averaged over six seconds on mobile, checkout failed intermittently under load, and the platform had gone down during two consecutive Diwali sales — the two most profitable weeks of the year. Online inventory was synced from the store ERP just once a night, so popular items oversold routinely and cancellations eroded customer trust.
Just as painful was the absence of usable data. Merchandising and finance teams worked from CSV exports that were weeks old by the time they were analysed. Questions as basic as which categories were profitable after returns and discounts took days to answer, and stocking decisions for 42 stores were made largely on instinct.