Costco is the world’s 3rd largest retailer with a $105.2bn turnover in 2013. It is an international wholesale membership club with over 600 warehouses around the world. The warehouses present one of the largest and most exclusive product category selections to be found under one roof. Costco is known for carrying top quality national and regional brands, at prices consistently below traditional wholesale or retail outlets.
In October 2013, Reply opened a second website for Costco in Mexico. Costco is now making plans for additional websites with Reply on the SAP Hybris ecommerce platform. The success of the UK site resulted in a blueprint template that was used as the basis of the Costco Mexico project.
Reply assembled a global team of specialists to cover Costco's technical leads and was able to provide teams in each of Costco's major geographies to meet the entire needs of the project, including:
Reply’s deep experience across a number of functions and regions, meant that the team could fully manage this all-encompassing project in terms of technical capability, market insight and global presence. The team comprised a network of specialist technology Reply companies, covering the entire needs of the project, cherry picking particular skills as the project moved into different stages. This agile approach meant that the Reply team was able to respond exactly to the specific requirements of the project at any one time. For example the UK website was migrated onto the Google Cloud Platform with minimal impact to the Costco team and with no unplanned outages.
Reply worked with Costco to develop an ecommerce solution that is not only futureproof, but that can be adapted to new markets. This proven success in two markets means that Costco has a high degree of confidence that the template will be valuable in its subsequent deployments, ultimately supporting the retailer’s global growth plans.
The ecommerce operation for Costco needed to support the core of its business framework – countless suppliers, millions of customers and a high turnover of products. This could have been a complex and unwieldy IT implementation, but Reply’s experience and skill has meant that the new ecommerce function is streamlined and responsive.