Mayfair House: eCommerce for Premium Brands

Mayfair House: eCommerce for Premium Brands

How we rebuilt Mayfair House’s e-commerce site with a foundation for extensibility and growth

SUMMARY

Mayfair House survived for many years on a legacy e-commerce platform. With a proprietary software license, the platform was developed almost a decade ago and built on PHP4. Needless to say the site was in need of an update. Mayfair House needed a modern ecommerce solution, and engaged with Facet Interactive to build an experience that reflected their high-end inventory.

Facet scoped the architecture, managed design requirements to take advantage of Drupal contrib solutions, and managed development leveraging our partnership with Axelerant.

With the extensibility and power of open source, we brought Mayfair House up to date and set the foundations for successful ecommerce.

Challenge

At the beginning of 2015, many critical bugs involving payment processing were uncovered on the old PHP4-based platform. A technical code audit showed numerous security risks. Mayfair House needed to be modernized—just in time for the 2015 holiday season, 6 months away.

Mayfair’s status is on par with Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Barneys.

With 105 brands approved for online sales, Mayfair House is one of a handful of online retailers permitted to carry competing brands.

Insight

As a high-end retailer trying to grow into its online business, Mayfair House sought a platform solution that would grow as its online content and e-commerce strategy matured. To get started, it was important to select a solution that offered robust e-commerce tools out of box, but also one we could easily reconfigure the site to suit an evolving online marketing strategy.

Brand Standards at a Premium

With 105 brands approved for online sales, Mayfair House is one of a handful of online retailers permitted to carry competing brands. Mayfair’s status is on par with Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Barneys.

Mayfair Sells Experience & Convenience

Since brands regulate pricing for their partners, Mayfair House has to focus on providing an excellent user experience and offering a conveniently wide selection of high-end retail products in order to compete. Creating brand loyalty to Mayfair is key to their continued growth, and we are excited to be a part of it.

Solution

Drupal is in Season

Facet worked with Mayfair House to select Drupal as the most qualified e-commerce platform, with the capability to grow into a blended product-discovery platform in the future. After selecting Drupal, Facet brought Axelerant onboard to execute a Drupal e-commerce site build and Drupal migration so Mayfair House could hit the e-commerce runway that winter—with a technology platform as robust as its brand portfolio.

Drupal Commerce

We selected Drupal commerce as the solution most capable of maturing into Mayfair’s vision for future e-commerce features. In the meantime, the Commerce Kickstart base proved to have enough preconfigured e-commerce functionality to get Mayfair started with minimal investment. The proof-of-concept hinged on the out-of-box viability, and extensibility into one key feature: registries.

Commerce Registry

Registries are a key driver of Mayfair’s burgeoning online business. Both private and public wedding registries drive exposure for Mayfair with friends and family of the brides and grooms. Besides the basic wishlist functionality, we needed to improve the commerce_registry project to allow for: tracking multiple quantity purchases at checkout, easy updates to quantity desired, and independent tracking of quality desired vs. quantity purchased.

Drupal Commerce Migration

Migration focused on customer and product data. Customer account information, order history, and registries needed a new home. Preserving tax and shipping information on invoices is also important for records keeping. Products needed to be migrated and organized with the appropriate attributes. The usability and admin functionality of Drupal Commerce encouraged Mayfair to rethink their current product content strategy.

Results

Mayfair House was able to capitalize on their luxury brand inventory for a successful Winter season on the new Drupal platform. Since the initial go-live, Mayfair has been able to add additional features without the worry of extreme overhead thanks to Facet's architecture planning and value-driven methodology. The luxury brand retailer's digital foundation is ready to support their growth for years to come.

105+

Luxury Brands Represented

6

Months from Discovery to Delivery