YNAP Scales and Innovates Faster to Provide High-End Shopping Experience Using AWS

YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP (YNAP) is a global online luxury retailer with 5.3 million customers in 180 countries. It needs to continually evolve customer journeys to compete in the high-fashion industry, where shoppers have many options for clothing and accessories retailers. Using AWS, YNAP reduced product testing times by 400 percent, so it’s able to quickly provide the cutting-edge features and luxury online shopping experiences that match the high quality of the goods it sells. The company also cut compute costs by more than half and worked with AWS to upskill staff on cloud-native technologies to support future growth.

YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP (YNAP) is a global online luxury retailer with 5.3 million customers in 180 countries. It needs to continually evolve customer journeys to compete in the high-fashion industry, where shoppers have many options for where to buy clothing and accessories.

Over its 20-year history, YNAP has embraced the latest technologies to offer the best possible experience to customers. When it decided to move to the cloud, the company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the breadth and maturity of its services.Using AWS, YNAP has reduced product testing times by 400 percent, so it’s able to quickly provide the cutting-edge features and luxury online shopping experiences that match the high quality of the goods it sells. The company also cut compute costs by more than half and worked with AWS to upskill staff on cloud-native technologies to support future growth.

YNAP operates online retailers NET-A-PORTER, MR PORTER, YOOX, and THE OUTNET, which sell clothing and accessories to consumers. It also manages ecommerce for other luxury brands, many of which want to provide bespoke experiences to customers.

These experiences involve advanced features such as personalized views of an online shop, virtual fitting services, and AI-powered personal shoppers that offer instant outfit suggestions based on a customer’s tastes.

To support these innovations, YNAP wanted to give its quality assurance (QA) engineers ways to quickly test and launch new features that improve the customer experience. Previously, its 5 QA engineers shared one testing environment, so they had to wait until one tester was finished with a feature before they could begin testing the next one. 

The team can now spin up parallel testing environments in seconds, using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises. This means each QA engineer has his own environment to test features, so the team can test five features simultaneously, increasing the total throughput by 400 percent.  

QA engineers and developers are also more productive and have greater autonomy from operations teams because they encounter fewer issues with production systems. The number of infrastructure issues requiring an immediate response from operations has decreased from two incidents a month to zero. “Using AWS, our teams respond faster to customer needs, have more freedom to innovate, and can directly support the evolution of the YNAP business and brand,” says  Marco Petrucci, core platform director at YNAP. 

Using AWS, YNAP has also reduced the man hours spent on infrastructure maintenance across 5 company functions and 10 different teams. This means the technical team can now focus on higher-value work and support strategic initiative rather than performing manual tasks. 

All of YNAP’s ecommerce sites must be responsive and reliable so shoppers can take advantage of their advanced capabilities. To keep sites running smoothly, YNAP needs to scale compute resources to handle spikes in traffic—which can reach 2.5 times the normal load--during sales promotions, marketing events, and busy seasons such as Christmas. 

YNAP can now quickly adjust resources to meet variable customer demand, helping to ensure that sites are always available and shoppers can make purchases seamlessly. Scaling compute resources now takes seconds using Amazon EKS, compared to hours with YNAP’s previous on-premises systems. This is critical for retaining customers, as any disruption in the shopping experience could cause customers to choose competitors’ sites. 

YNAP also reduced compute costs using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which runs fault-tolerant workloads at a discount. The company achieved average savings of 59 percent, compared to its previous on-demand pricing. 

To meet the challenges of working with new cloud technologies, YNAP introduced training and education initiatives led by AWS. The training helps IT staff develop the skills to create high-quality and well-architected cloud solutions in a timely manner, so they can contribute to exceeding customer expectations and accommodating a growing audience. 

YNAP believes investing in training is essential to staff satisfaction and productivity. “In moving to the cloud, you need to upskill teams and make them feel part of the journey,” says Marco Pesenti, director of platform finance and shared services at YNAP. “When people’s working lives change, it’s not just about leaving behind the old ways of doing things. You also need to allocate time to create excitement for a new range of tasks, areas of focus, and goals.”

To achieve that, YNAP offered a blended learning approach. Employees working on their AWS certification followed online training courses and also learned from the company’s cloud champions, a number of internal early adopters for AWS technologies and solutions. 

YNAP will continue to use AWS to support its future ambitions and international expansion. With established operations in Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US, the company is currently enlarging its presence in mainland China and the Middle East. 

Throughout its growth, YNAP maintains its focus on the customer. “Evolving customer experience is essential to our success,” says Pesenti. “We’re always looking for the best technology to support that, and AWS gives us the tools we need to stay a step ahead in the competitive fashion industry.”