Paragon Technology and Innovation Reinvents the Digital Beauty Experience with Ecommerce on AWS

Paragon Technology and Innovation (PTI) is an innovative Indonesian beauty company that’s been serving its customers with a variety of homegrown cosmetics for over 40 years. With more than 10,000 employees and over 1,600 different products, PTI is one of the biggest beauty companies in Indonesia.

A decade after its founding, PTI introduced its flagship Halal beauty brand Wardãh to cater to the growing local demand for Halal cosmetics. But in early 2020, Wardãh faced increasing competition from local and international beauty brands selling online. With customers unable to shop at physical stores, the business looked at integrating ecommerce into its existing website.  

Wardãh's on-premises website wasn’t equipped to handle spikes in traffic during sales campaigns, let alone an ecommerce functionality. Furthermore, PTI had plans to launch a virtual makeup simulation feature on its site.

To cope with dynamic site loads and introduce secure features, the business migrated Wardãh's website to run on the cloud. However, shortly after, it experienced performance and reliability issues with its cloud provider and turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The local AWS team worked closely with PTI and PTI’s partner, MobileForce, to support a cloud-to-cloud migration and respond to technical queries.

PTI’s shift to AWS has allowed the business to launch an ecommerce-enabled website in just one month. Its website scales seamlessly during campaigns, supporting an average peak of 5,000 concurrent site visits. To achieve this, the site is running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling instances, with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) scaling its MySQL database on AWS.

In addition to managing peak loads, the company has improved page load times. “Every second counts in ecommerce because it influences a buyer’s decision to make a purchase. With AWS, we have reduced page load times and our customers can experience a smooth online buying experience,” says Rizki Rivai, head of IT cloud and infrastructure at PTI.

Besides improved website performance, PTI’s IT personnel work more effectively using the skills the AWS team has helped them develop. “We can deploy software on the AWS Cloud in an hour or less—which is twice as fast as before. Now our team can focus on introducing new site features,” says Tessi Fathia Adam, senior head of digital transformation at PTI.

This includes an interactive artificial-intelligence (AI) feature that lets consumers try on makeup virtually, on any camera-enabled device, helping them select the right beauty products for their skin tone.

With Wardãh’s ecommerce-enabled website on the AWS Cloud, PTI has the foundation to increase its online sales and deliver on its yearly growth target. The company is also exploring a data lake on AWS to leverage the data and extract insights on how to further drive customer loyalty.

Tessi Fathia Adam concludes, “AWS offers so many ways for you to harness your data to drive business. We’re currently running some proof of concepts for a data lake but have bigger plans for a full stack data and analytics solution on AWS to help us make more informed decisions based on buyer behavior.”

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/ecommerce-applications/