Case study . Ecommerce & Retail
Luxury brand improves the quality of its visual assets with TwicPics
About ecommerce for luxury brands
Since the beginning of ecommerce, customer experience has always been a key indicator for brands. The luxury sector is no exception to the rule, quite the contrary. The largest brands are fighting to have the best visuals and the most attractive websites so that the customer, even behind his computer screen, manages to live a timeless experience as it could be the case in a store.
The online traffic on these sites is generally multi-continental and several million pages are visited each month generating several million or billion euros in sales per month.
The challenge
Delivering quality visuals that reflect the image of this luxury brand
The packshots provided by the creative teams of this Luxury House were adapted to meet the needs of the web but on the other hand the optimization of the great qualitative marketing assets represented a real challenge. How to keep a finesse in the definition of images, worthy of the Haute Couture, while adapting the media to meet the performance issues on the site?
These are all quality constraints that challenge the IT teams in terms of web performance on the site. Heavy visuals impact page loading times. But they also impact the cost of image bandwidth. Visitors are coming in, ecommerce is growing fast, and so is the Content Delivery Network (CDN) budget.
Before TwicPics, the luxury goods company was delivering 100TB of images per month despite the presence of DIS, a native optimization tool in SalesForce Commerce Cloud (SFCC). DIS can perform simple operations such as compression, but does not process metadata on the visuals that come out of the House's Art Department and does not adapt the images to the context of Internet users. The Chinese version of the website also presented specific difficulties for CDN.
On the mobile application used in the store by the sales staff, the situation is similar. The weight of the images slows down their display and impacts the tool's performance.
The TwicPics solution
Reducing bandwidth to improve display performance
In a constant effort to reduce bandwidth and increase web performance while meeting the high standards of the luxury world, the IT teams turned to TwicPics.
The first step was the integration of TwicPics into the application for in-store tablets: immediate gains in display speed and in the quality of the product visuals displayed to customers by the consultants.
On the previous version of the site, the solution was first implemented in a "QuickWin" mode (mapping of the image origins to a TwicPics sub-domain, while keeping DIS). The flow of images is outsourced to TwicPics, the CDN consumption is reduced.
As part of a replatforming project, the IT teams then integrated TwicPics Native into the website frontend. The image traffic of 100TB per month is divided by 10 and the performance gains are noticeable, worldwide. To address the Chinese website, this luxury brand and TwicPics set up a custom CDN to deliver the images to China.
The results
Simplification of the process to deliver high-quality visuals online
The marketing and design teams validate the solution. All they have to do is upload a single HD visual and it is automatically recalculated, optimized, and adapted according to the context of the user on the site (screen device and resolution, Retina, browser, network connection).
Since 80% of traffic is on mobile devices, TwicPics provides real added value in adapting image content to these devices.
The exceptional quality of the visuals coming out of the studio is ensured on the web: it is no longer necessary to make quality compromises to reach the performance objectives of the technical teams. Marketing teams contribute with 3000x3000 to 5000x5000 pixel images optimized on the fly by TwicPics to address the finesse of Retina displays.
Improved performance through fine-tuned image optimization leads to a better UX and therefore a better conversion rate. This progress allows the company to meet its ambitious objectives for ecommerce, which represents about 25% of its sales, even if it still remains very attached to its stores. In addition, omnichannel is booming. The House must maintain a level of high-visual quality online that matches the in-store experience to help reinforce the luxury brand's web-to-store strategy.
