Al-Shamil Improves Customer Experience and Automates Inventory Updates Using AWS

Saudi Arabian retailer Al-Shamil rapidly launched an ecommerce site when the COVID-19 pandemic began. But it soon realized it needed an automated system to update the inventory on its website. With 60,000 items in stock, and regular inventory refreshes, it took 10 members of staff to keep systems updated on a daily basis.

Al-Shamil needed a website that was easy for customers to navigate, and simple for staff to manage and update. The company turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Snap for Information Technology (SnapTec) to improve the customer experience of its site and to integrate with its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to automate inventory updates.

Al-Shamil chose SnapTec because of its experience in the ecommerce market. “SnapTec has a complete team dedicated to building and launching ecommerce solutions. They are real experts,” says Mohammed Alkhateeb, head of ecommerce at Al-Shamil.

Despite the preference of Saudi consumers for real-world shopping, the initial launch of the site was successful. “After constructing the website, we had a very high demand compared to our physical branches,” says Alkhateeb.

Since its launch, the company has had more than 3,500 regular online customers, with many using the site at least once or twice per week. A mobile app was launched later in 2021, with the company’s online customers growing further. The app was downloaded 7,000 times in the first month with the figure now standing at 18,000 downloads.

Next, Al-Shamil wanted the website customer experience to run as smoothly as its internal systems. SnapTec implemented a number of interface improvements to the site layout to improve usability. “Initially, there were user interface and user experience issues. Sometimes it was simply about placing buttons in the right place to improve the customer journey,” says Mamdoh Ahmed, managing director at SnapTec.

Al-Shamil is also using machine learning (ML) to improve the search function on the website. With such a large inventory and so many categories of product, it can sometimes be difficult for customers to find what they want. That led the company to introduce a ‘Smart Search’ function using ML to improve findability—even if words are spelt incorrectly or are not exact matches with inventory items. This search functionality runs on Amazon OpenSearch Service and is already proving popular with customers, with more successful searches completed.

When it launched, the website had a limit of 60,000 stock keeping units (SKUs). This forced the company to only display the products it felt to be most essential for customers. However, with a growing number of SKUs and an expanding customer base, Al-Shamil wanted the agility to add more SKUs as it chose, and the ability to scale as demand grew.

SnapTec recommended using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to allow the website to scale instantly when customer demand grew. The site can now manage up to 5,000 simultaneous users. It has also increased the number of items available online from 60,000 SKUs to the full 100,000 or so available in its largest real-world stores.

Al-Shamil is pleased with the improvements and once its ERP system is fully migrated to the cloud, the company is going all-in on AWS. “We want to migrate everything to AWS for efficiency and security. It will provide a more seamless omnichannel experience and, most importantly, it will perfect our real-time reporting and support data-driven decision making,” says Alkhateeb.

Al-Shamil is still facing some challenges with its on-premises systems, notably around availability. Currently, each individual store must connect to the central ERP system to log sales reports but at times the data center or network connections are not available, so reporting does not happen. Migrating this function from on-premises to AWS will speed-up report generation and provide better data-based decision making for buyers, marketing, and financial planners across the whole group.

Now with a solid foundation for its ecommerce site, Al-Shamil is keen to grow its online market with support from SnapTec. “We’ve built a strong base of online customers and a scalable, intuitive website using AWS. Now, by providing incentives, like discounts and free deliveries, we hope to grow even further—with the confidence that our website can handle the demand,” says Alkhateeb.