HER
About HER
HER is a Romanian beauty products brand, comprising women’s products such as: skin care, UV nail products, gel polish, nail art and more. It was established in 2020 having the sole purpose of offering exquisite and quality products for women across the world.
HER owns a WooCommerce shop that provides about 90% of the company’s net revenue. Even though the shop was built on WordPress it provides a clean interface and fast product acquisition for customers, with a focus on mobile usability and acquisitions.
2024
eCommerce
4
Europe
The Challenge
As the brand has grown into a reputable company with over 1 million EUR net revenue, its e-commerce solution has begun experiencing technical challenges that are specific to a high-income online store. With brand popularity arises situations such as high traffic, increased pages interactivity and high simultaneously orders placement and payments. This translates into constant pressure over the store’s infrastructure, codebase and flows.
HER’s bottom line was during the 2023 Black Friday sale that offered up to 70% discount promotions during an entire week. In the sale’s first day, the store crashed and was offline for over 12 hours while for the rest of the week, customers complaint about orders not being able to go through, payments not being placed or the inability to add products to the cart or access specific product pages.
Another challenge of this project was the fact that HER is an online solution connected to an entire ERP system that manages stock inventory, logistics and billing thus, any technical intervention would have to take into consideration several third-party systems that were integrated through APIs and communicated consistently with the store.
Technologies we used
The Approach
Following several client meetings and documents disclosure to better understand their needs and plans for future business expansion, we began this project by carefully planning our future steps, deadlines and by issuing a full system audit that includes the online store, infrastructure, third-party systems and marketing tools they were using for traffic analysis.
Auditing the infrastructure
Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Trends provided accurate data regarding traffic behavior and acquisitions, and we were able to project a necessary infrastructure that will withstand this traffic as well as a higher traffic since part of this project, we also added many new user functionalities.
Auditing the online store
The online store auditing pointed out that many plugins will have to be removed, thus eliminating render-blocking resources, a big JavaScript DOM load and unnecessary files that were loaded into WordPress.
Auditing third-party resources
External resources are awesome, and it helps to have a bunch of microservices that solve your everyday problems. However, all these services will require resources, a clean codebase and a management flow that will ensure things run smoothly. We conducted a full audit over HER’s current ERP system, logistics services and connection with billing and HR software.
Continuous deployment
Continuous deployment is a process that is very important for us at ZONKWAVE and an online store should benefit from development, testing and production environments. At the end of day, the most successful online solutions are the ones that keep on adding functionalities, user journeys are recorded, adapted and improved and traffic is efficiently analyzed daily.
The Solution
We switched from a shared hosting server that had decent resources to a high performing VPS server with 16 CPU, 32 GB RAM (5200 MHZ) and 800 GB SSD. This specific infrastructure was chosen also since HER is a brand that in 2025 will expand in the entire EU market hence projected traffic will grow exponentially and because of a new ERP integration that we developed for the store. The VPS server will also expand the customers’ expansion plan for the next 5 years, being able to allocate more resources, if needed.
Online store performance and optimizations
During this process we got rid of all the nasty plugins the store was using, reducing their number from 57 to 19, ensuring that we keep only the essential modules that couldn’t be replaced, or it would have been too expensive to recreate those functionalities. Plugins that were used to add small functionalities, animations or random CSS code were removed and the code was added to the theme’s main files. Total number of files was reduced from 108.721 to 36.544, thus improving dramatically the store’s overall performance and potential security concerns (the more plugins you have, the more security issues the store might have).
We also configured optimization modules such as LiteSpeed, creating minified and optimized CSS and JS files, server Gzip compressions, image optimizations and much more.
Continuous deployment
Automated development and testing environments were created using Jenkins, ensuring that future functionalities will be added seamlessly and deployed into production in a timely manner.
New ERP integration
As the old ERP was not enough for the customer’s growing business, we proceeded at implementing a newly ERP system that will encompass inventory, logistics and billing into one single system, rather than having separated services like before our intervention.
New features
Per customer request, we added many new features such as geolocation prices management, multi-language online store, cross-selling implementation or UI redesign.
The Conclusion
Following the completion of the project’s first phase, HER successfully completed the best Black Friday Weel promotion in 2024 with a user growth of over 80% and checking the week’s net sales over 300.000 EUR, thus bringing the company to a yearly revenue that surpassed 2.000.000 EUR.
Numbers speak for themselves and of course, a happy customer is what we always strive for. We managed to plan and implement a new infrastructure, online store and integrations in 45 days. The HER brand now benefits from a highly stable and modern infrastructure, security enhancements and store optimizations as well as new features that will boost customer retention and overall sales. The online solution is also ready to conquer new markets through the EU expansion and provide more efficient payments and logistics to its customers.