Samsung creates mega data monitoring operation with VTEX IO

Challenge

In Brazil, Samsung is active on many digital fronts and adopts a D2C strategy on its main site.  They also have an official app (Loja Samsung); portals for partners, students, employees, and more; and integrations with several marketplaces. The robustness of the whole operation presents a challenge to overcome: centralizing and integrating the information from all these channels smartly and efficiently. 

When the brand turned to VTEX, it was looking to overcome poor visibility into its order flow, status, and the results of the projects implemented by the IT team. Aiming to optimize staff time and company investments, Samsung needed a customer journey and order-tracking solution that could deliver:

• Tools for informed decision-making.
• More proactivity in the operation.
• Customized alarms and control dashboards.

“Without a clear plan for monitoring our applications, we felt that we needed to anticipate situations that happen commonly in the production environment and were not being noticed during the feature release flow.”

– Raphael Sbegue, head of Solutions Engineering, Test Automation, and Observability at Samsung

Solution

The data monitoring project took traction two weeks before Black Friday 2022. During this period, the VTEX team, together with the Samsung team, implemented preventive and corrective actions based on the monitored data.

Samsung noticed the efficiency of the VTEX IO backend services and the APIs available to create integrations with third parties, thus collecting information, creating alarm mechanisms, and building analysis and control dashboards.

With VTEX IO, Samsung was able to implement:

• Standard VTEX Pixel app templates to the frontend of the operation. With this app, the company can have visibility of the volume and origin of visits, results of campaigns, and specific promotions. When installed in the VTEX account, the Pixel app adds scripts to all store pages, providing full insight into the user journey and behavior.

• Order Feed e Order Hook. Using VTEX’s Feed v3, Samsung is now able to receive order updates automatically by simply integrating it with their OMS. In other words, payment, pricing, and order status changes are notified instantly. The company first set up requests and logs in Elastic Stack for each status and sales channel and then configured the order integration to SAP. Now, the teams get the information they need to spot bottlenecks in logistics, service, payment, order completion, and catalog issues.

While the Order Feed is active, with periodic updates via API calls, the Order Hook sends a notification every time there is a change in the order, which makes the response time for any kind of trouble or complication shorter, since it is done in real-time.

Samsung has also developed solutions that ensure the receiving and processing of information directly from the VTEX OMS. Here’s how the company did it:

• The Samsung team built the integration with Elastic Stack through the backend, which receives Order Hook notifications through a VTEX IO proxy. The Elastic Stack engine enables the company to process large volumes of data simultaneously and in real-time, creating sales funnel dashboards for monitoring operations, site performance, services display, among others.
  

• Another interesting solution was adding a Telegram alarm mechanism, in addition to the traditional email/SMS channels. ​The team created channels to receive alerts triggered by Elastic Stack, speeding up problem identification and enabling automation in the VTEX platform. 
  

• Daily, test routines covering more than ten different shopping journeys are triggered through the pipeline, running more than 300 navigation tests. When they identify any inconsistency in the journey, the channels in charge are notified.

VTEX leverages AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and AWS Elastic Beanstalk to automatically scale resources and to split responsibilities among its product development engineering teams. Amazon CloudFront acts as VTEX’s content delivery network (CDN). Other AWS services utilized by VTEX include Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon OpenSearch Service for distributed search, Amazon Elasticache Redis for cache, and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing. Due to VTEX being a true multi-tenant SaaS solution, all customers benefit from the same elasticity and stability of AWS.

Results

Six months after implementing the data monitoring project, Samsung has achieved great results that impact efficiency and operational processes, improving the performance of the online store and enhancing the end users’ experience.

• The first-response time has decreased from four hours to less than forty minutes thanks to the Telegram alarms. 
  

• With Elastic Stack’s real-time updates, the company was able to recover and reprocess over 300 orders that were “lost” during a period of instability on Black Friday 2022. The image below illustrates the channel order drop in the order integration process with SAP. They were able to identify and solve a problem with the integration partner and prevent other consumers from getting dissatisfied should the problem persist.

• Smart launching strategy. With Elastic Stack, Samsung created an automation to run SKU simulations that help track availability and pricing. The first test of this strategy happened during the launch of the Samsung S23 smartphone, proactively ensuring visibility of the purchase flow from catalog notifications.

*All figures and information in the text above have been provided and approved by Samsung.