WatchBox launches eCommerce 50% faster in new markets

Challenge

Scaling brick-and-mortar operations globally via eCommerce

WatchBox is the world's leading company for buying, selling and trading pre-owned luxury watches with more than $200M in revenue and a presence that spans the globe. The company’s success relies on exposing its inventory to as many customers as possible for quick resale. To do so, WatchBox decided to move beyond brick-and-mortar retail and scale its business internationally via eCommerce. This required creating a powerful eCommerce experience that not only allows for rapid expansion, but also pulls critical inventory data from legacy and homegrown systems.

Objectives

Powering global expansion through digital transformation

• Creating an eCommerce platform that allows for rapid expansion into new regions
• Unlocking and unifying data from legacy and homegrown systems
• Building standardized eCommerce processes that support quick inventory turnover

Solution

Using APIs to bring luxury watches to consumers everywhere

To achieve its objectives, WatchBox turned to MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™ to roll out eCommerce sites, powered by Salesforce Commerce Cloud, for the United States and European Union.

“Before bringing in MuleSoft, our IT team had to spend significant time and resources to try to integrate data within our legacy and homegrown systems. With Anypoint Platform, our team is now using an API-led approach to integration, to connect that data faster than ever before,” said Shri Ballal, CTO, WatchBox.

WatchBox combined inventory data with its product catalogs and pricing information in Salesforce Commerce Cloud — surfacing local product information and product availability in the right currency and language for each market.

After rapidly building APIs, the WatchBox team used Anypoint Platform to test them and ensure they meet the company’s security, scalability, and reliability standards — a must given that WatchBox’s inventory consists of expensive, one-of-a-kind watches.

Within six months, the company stood up an eCommerce platform that supports customers in both the U.S. and E.U. The WatchBox team then reused the same APIs, such as its Inventory API and Pricing API, to deliver eCommerce experiences to new markets much faster — in six weeks for the Middle East, and in two weeks for Singapore.

“We previously relied on a legacy Wordpress eCommerce platform, which involved legacy and manual processes, such as using Google Sheets to manage our inventory and post updates to our eCommerce site based on that spreadsheet,” said Ballal.

“Now, with MuleSoft and Salesforce, we have fully connected our legacy systems with our other systems via API integration. Our robust inventory management system automatically powers all of our inventory data and pushes stock information to Salesforce Commerce Cloud for quick inventory turnover — all in real time,” said Ballal.

Results

Launching eCommerce experiences in new markets 50% faster

By adopting Anypoint Platform and an API-led approach to integration, the WatchBox IT team created a scalable and robust eCommerce foundation in less than six months.

“When I took the responsibility at WatchBox in 2017, it didn’t look anything like it is now. Our architecture consisted of completely siloed data. Thanks to our API-led strategy, we now have a fully integrated, digital architecture that scales across markets and regions,” said Ballal.

And by reusing API-led integrations for new launches, WatchBox expands its presence into any new region 50% faster than before.

"With MuleSoft, we were able to release our integrated eCommerce web experience to our customers in new markets, such as Singapore, in record time — just two weeks. This would not have been possible without the foundation of API reuse that we built using Anypoint Platform," said Ballal.

Additionally, today WatchBox uses 25% less resources to maintain its eCommerce integrations thanks to Anypoint Platform’s monitoring and event-driven notification capabilities, which help the IT team identify and resolve issues quickly and easily.

“WatchBox’s main objective is to be a global brand in pre-owned luxury watches — bringing the luxury watch experience to customers around the world, no matter where they’re based. We can now do just that, and it would not have been possible without MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform,” said Ballal.