Case study

Ensuring a Digital Future with Composable Headless Commerce – Mirumee's replatforming of Rough Trade

01 Story

INDEPENDENT PURVEYORS OF GREAT MUSIC SINCE 1976

Rough Trade was established in 1976 by Jeff Travis, as a unique concept combining a record label, distribution and retail store. However, in the 1980s, the record shop branched off from the label and distribution, paving the way for Rough Trade to evolve into what it is today.

With over 100,000 products, including vinyl, CDs, books and merchandise, Rough Trade offers an extensive collection that caters to a diverse range of tastes. With several retail stores located in both the UK and the US, Rough Trade has expanded its reach to serve a global customer base.

Rough Trade has also collaborated with various production houses and artists, solidifying its position as a leading authority in the music industry. As a result, it has earned a reputation for its exceptional customer service, knowledgeable staff, and its commitment to promoting new and emerging talent.

roughtrade.com

music since 1976,

technologies from 2022

02 Mission

Rough Trade’s amazing in-store experience for music and record enthusiasts inspired them to share it online. Their current online store was not able to grow together with Rough Trade’s needs. They needed a solution that is more scalable and can handle large amounts of users and requests that were being made on a daily basis and during peak season, for example during their launch of Albums of the Year.

With Mirumee’s expertise in user experience and love of music, we developed a flexible and scalable platform to serve both customers and the Rough Trade brand. By using commerce and headless solutions, we created a new platform with personalized music discovery and seamless integrations with the best tools. The new online store is not only a place to purchase music and merchandise. It became a place that the users enjoy and spend time on, while listening to music and browsing through their favorites.

The flexibility of the composable architecture allows us to easily add or remove features as we need them, without any hassle. The entire process of replatforming our e-commerce was smooth and painless, thanks to the expertise of the Mirumee team. The result is a beautiful and efficient website that has received a lot of positive feedback from our customers. We couldn't have done it without Mirumee and Saleor, and we look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.

Lawrence Montgomery,

Managing Director at Rough Trade

03 Challenges

Replatforming of Rough Trade’s Online Business

In order to cope with its high-volume web traffic, Rough Trade has recently undergone a full replatforming of its entire online business. The company’s platform not only experiences high traffic on a daily basis, but also through seasonal releases of new albums, promotions like Black Friday, or during the launch of Albums of the Year. The replatforming aimed to adjust the technology to better handle the number of users browsing pages while also providing a highly personalized and fast search option.

Enhancing Web Infrastructure to Meet High-Traffic Demands

A brand catering to both new and old customers, Rough Trade has a dedicated community that values a smooth purchasing experience and is eager to purchase limited items, particularly during peak times of new releases. However, prior to the replatforming of Rough Trade, they encountered difficulties in managing extended periods of high-volume web traffic. To tackle this issue, an elastic scaling solution was implemented to safeguard the infrastructure during moments of intense demand.

Modelling data structure

With a catalogue of over 150k products and 120k associated variants, Rough Trade needed the tech stack designed for heavy duty and growth. To address the volume of data, we determined how information is stored and related to each other in the system. This involved identifying and modelling the data that powered the e-commerce platform. In the end, one consistently under-appreciated aspect of the e-commerce stack is the capacity and limitations of the underlying data structure. Handling and optimizing it has, for that reason, become our goal.

Improving Key Metrics

Rough Trade aimed to enhance metrics and user experience on their website. They experienced an increase in bounce rate and a decrease in pages per session. To address this, we suggested implementing SEO strategies and setting up a long-term analytical reporting system using GA4 and Vercel. By optimizing website content, improving engagement, relevance, and navigation, and tracking user behavior with GA4 and Vercel, our goal was to improve website metrics and drive better user engagement for Rough Trade.

Rough Trade mobile website search popular

04 Technology

05 Stats

Catalogue with over

150K^products

Bounce rate
decreased by:

41.92%

Google ranking
increased by:

+21.4%

Last year’s 2.7 CTR on search
results increased to:

3.3

Growth in earned revenue from
Klaviyo mail flows, since launch:

>£70k^{in 3 weeks}

The last year’s count of 6.4 pages per
session, grew by:

+80%

06 Expertise

Selecting components that work seamlessly together

One of the key factors in the success of our collaboration is the selection of tools and microservices that seamlessly work together to create a unified and scalable product. Our team has carefully chosen components that are specifically designed to meet the needs of the service and the users. We managed to build an entirely new experience from the ground up.

Relationships played a crucial role in the success of this project

This level of collaboration has also enabled us to plan for future expansion into new markets and add new features to the service to better serve its users. We work together to create technology that is tailored to meet the needs of users and can grow and expand as needed. Through collaboration, communication, and careful planning, we are able to create a seamless and unified product. The results that we are able to track and match with the release of the new Rough Trade online store are a living testament to our partnership.

07 Strategy

Introducing
Composable
Architecture

Composable architecture is a software development approach that involves breaking down an application into smaller, independent services that can be easily combined and reconfigured to meet specific business needs. Saleor is an open-source e-commerce platform that is built using a composable architecture approach. During the replatforming of Rough Trade, Saleor was at the forefront of our strategic planning and the product development.

Personalized shopping experience

Replatforming from a self-hosting system to composable SaaS offers the ability to quickly implement changes, maintainability and ease of development. Thanks to the extensibility of Saleor’s headless commerce platform, we created a robust infrastructure that allowed Rough Trade to serve double the previous biggest-ever peak during a single day. This was achieved while maintaining high website performance and conversion rate, without any drop off in speed or increase in bug reports.

Discover Your Favorites with Rough Trade

Creating an integration of a Rough Trade customer account with a private profile on Spotify was intended to allow users to discover more of the music they love, and thus interact more deeply with the service. Using Spotify's API to provide much better personalization of content to the user has reduced the bounce rate by 20%, proving that customers are much more engaged and helping Rough Trade connect with them in a modern way.

Optimized Search Allowing to Dig Deeper

For a large online store like Rough Trade, which has a catalog of more than 100,000 products, search optimization that allows automatic prioritization of results, customization of searches and self-defined segments is integral. Getting Algolia to make changes in search had a huge impact on performance. Customers browsed two times as many pages as on the legacy site. Pages per session nearly doubled but with the same average of time spent on site. Users dig deeper into the catalog because the new search is easy and enjoyable to interact with.

Real-Time Stock Management

Erply allows smart management of stock both online and offline. Both the online checkout and the in-store cash register are linked to this system, which provides real-time accurate information about product availability for customers and employees of the Rough Trade brand. Erply was integrated with Saleor in a custom way, to enable servicing of low- and high-frequency site visitors.

Implementation of Fair Pre-Orders

The transaction amount will be only deducted from the buyer's account after the purchased pre-order items are shipped to the customer. It is a game changer and an introduction to a customized flow. Without this feature, every order is charged during checkout regardless of whether the pre-order is shipped out immediately or at a later time.

Replatforming to Google Analytics 4 and Advanced Events

Replatforming to Google Analytics 4 and adding advanced events in order to give the team a better overview and understanding of site performance and user experience within browsing through the pages.

Hassle-Free Checkout with Appropriate Taxation Rates

Avalara automatically adds the appropriate amount of taxation at the checkout stage. Thanks to this service, customers both in the US and the UK are being taxed fully aligned to the given location and taxation laws.

08 Scalability

Ready for new markets

Expanding into new markets is crucial for business growth, and our composable commerce architecture makes it easy for the Rough Trade brand to do so by supporting the seamless introduction of their product to new countries and currencies. This not only helps the brand scale its business but also boosts earnings.

Open to no-code/low-code

Saleor’s extensibility is a valuable asset for those who prefer no-code or low-code development. It enables users to easily plug in new tools and customize specific aspects of their e-commerce website in a simple and scalable way. This ensures a smooth and efficient development process that saves time and resources.

Continuing cooperation into the future

The cooperation between Mirumee and Rough Trade is ongoing, as the team provides data-driven analysis to empower stakeholders with advanced analytics. With this powerful tool, Rough Trade can apply different business models and strategies to drive growth and success well into the future.