Overview

By modernizing Ulysse Nardin’s Digital Web Commerce Platform, Merkle delivered a modern, insightful, and scalable content management system (CMS) on AWS. Embracing web analytics, monitoring, and insights, Ulysse Nardin was able to leverage agile development to focus on customer centricity, speed to market, and performance of their new platform to better serve its customers.

Modernization from AWS technologies allowed Ulysse Nardin to gain insightful data where their customers focus their attention more efficiently to better personalize the customer experience in the moment. UN gained the ability to focus resources on driving better customer experiences to increase revenue rather than wasting time on operations of their on-premise antiquated web platform.

The challenge

The current UN Commerce experience lacked continuity, relevance, and convenience for it customers. A fragmented approach to ID resolution, journey orchestration, slow and irrelevant content delivery, UN had noticed a large drop off from its customer base not progressing through to checkout as many were abandoning carts without transacting.  This demonstrated frustration with the experience and resulted in lower than acceptable acquisition and conversion numbers.

The ecommerce team at Ulysse Nardin was looking to modernize its online sales presence to stay competitive within the market, gain actionable insights to anticipate growing demands, and keep up with digital-first customer preferences. However, introducing a new content management system (CMS) platform, new culture of product-based development, and a new environment on AWS can be overwhelming for many organizations if not well managed and orchestrated. The previous solution was a monolithic architecture that lacked intelligent insights using waterfall based deployments where customer responses were lagged. The new solution had to be well-architected and be performant, available, and scalable to justify the investment to modernize and activate data.

The approach

Ulysse Nardin chose AWS because it is a comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers, including fast-growing startups, large enterprises, and leading government agencies use AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. Brands choose AWS for its open, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions for scaling mission critical workloads.

Ulysse Nardin brought in Merkle as their preferred AWS partner because of the existing strong relationship and Merkle’s 32 years of experience helping top global brands deliver personalized customer experiences based on data-driven, customer-centric strategies. Merkle’s experience lies in the intersection of technology, data, analytics, and partner relationships to deliver the experience-based marketing strategies that build enduring customer relationships and drive competitive advantage for the brands served.

A modernized automated ecommerce platform built on Kubernetes and Magento focusing on an enhanced customer experience through data driven insights using distributed architecture coupled with AWS DevOps tools including: CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure-As-Code, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Elasticache for Redis.   

Ulysse Nardin gained full observability, monitoring, and logging using Amazon CloudWatch, DataDog, Amazon Simple Email Service (AWS SES) and AWS CloudTrail, security by AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and AWS Shield, in public and private VPCs secured by VPN and least privilege role based access using IAM, and best-in-class data solutions for Disaster Recovery such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The outcome

The Merkle team was able to deploy a highly available and automated ecommerce platform that can scale and optimize to handle the needs of a growing global brand. Leveraging web platform insights and analytics through dashboards, observability, monitoring, and logging, being on AWS has increased productivity and changed focus to speed of development to optimize customer experiences and increased web traffic. 

The solution allowed Ulysse Nardin to move toward a simpler management and oversight of its ecommerce platform through configuration over custom development with Magento and understand where their customers and shoppers are interacting on their platform. Merkle developed a solution that achieves the best of both worlds with Magento as the CMS, AWS to host the infrastructure, and Google Analytics to focus on their customer journey. The new solution on AWS has drawn 125% increase in average time spent on the website and 100% increase in conversion rates from customers since adding data driven metrics and KPIs to the solution.  Ulysse Nardin is set for success as they scale investments into their customer journey rather than platform operations.