Expanding ecommerce for RS Components, to reach new markets and increase revenue.
RS Components is a global electronic retailer and omni-channel industrial and electronics solutions provider, distributing more than 500,000 products to over a million customers worldwide.
The challenge
To rapidly deliver a set of multi-language and multi-currency ecommerce sites, aimed at increasing RS Components’ market share in the Southeast Asia (SEA) region.
Targeting the Indonesia and Vietnam markets, these new sites would provide customers with access to over 60,000 products across the industrial and electronics ranges. It was vital that the solution offered an exceptional end-user experience that would enable customers to intuitively search and purchase from the extensive RS Components product catalogue.
The solution
To drive rapid and cost-effective delivery, Box UK’s development team built the sites using the open source content management system WordPress – taking advantage of the framework’s renowned flexibility and ease-of-use, as well as its extensive library of plugins and partner solutions. This included WooCommerce, an ecommerce platform built on WordPress that provides the tools needed to manage an international online store.
Importantly, having previously used these technologies to deliver a large-scale ecommerce platform for OKdo, the Box UK team knew that they were proven to work at scale. This was a crucial consideration for the new sites, which offer over 60,000 separate product lines, representing the best-selling items from RS Components’ wider catalogue of 500,000 items.
Managing such a large volume of diverse products required bespoke development, to deliver an automatic import function that ensures product details remain accurate and up-to-date. Handling a flat file containing pricing and taxonomy information on all products, the import function performs 18 million comparisons overnight to make any necessary updates – doing so with minimal disruption to the sites’ performance.
Additionally, the sites were built with international Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) considerations in mind, to ensure the right technical foundations were in place at the outset and that the sites ranked highly in search results almost immediately, helping drive relevant and valuable traffic to key pages.
Utilising the full power of WordPress and WooCommerce, each site is feature rich with currency conversion, translation function and robust search functionality to deliver an exceptional end-user experience.
The result
With the Indonesia and Vietnam sites launched in just 9 two-week sprints, RS Components was able to begin directly serving these valuable markets without delay from a reliable, usable and high-performance platform that’s tailored to their specific requirements and expectations.
The work undertaken on the complex taxonomy and site-wide mega navigation menu – which allows customers to browse and find relevant products with ease – has been recognised by the international Communicator Awards, winning an Award of Distinction in the ‘Navigation Design for Websites’ category.
And, aware that RS Components may need to rapidly respond to additional opportunities as they continue to expand their reach within the SEA region, everything has been built on an innovative multi-site infrastructure that supports the rapid deployment of new country sites – giving the client the scalability they need to further grow their international proposition in the future.
"Box UK navigated the extremely complex internal environment and was able to get the project fully implemented quickly."
