Rebuilding a New York
Zabar’s has long been a family-owned New York City institution. The landmark food store uses the smells of freshly baked goods, imported cheeses and rich coffees as the core of its in-store experience.
Keeping true to the company’s roots, brothers and co-owners Saul and Stanley Zabar, president and VP, respectively, still hand-select, taste and market fresh products daily. These experiences help the family attract approximately 35,000 customers a week and produce $40 million in sales a year.
But demand for the store’s specialty items has far surpassed the borders of the city, especially as tourists and relocated Manhattanites long for their Zabar’s fix. This demand was one factor that pushed the company to jump into the e-commerce wave in 2000.
The family quickly learned that having an online store is only the first step. It didn’t take long for Zabar’s to process 30% of its annual online sales during the month of December alone. And as shoppers placed their holiday orders, the company quickly began receiving 2,500 to 3,000 orders daily-a significant jump compared to its typical 150 daily-order count during the off-season.
Finding it hard to keep up with such increases, the retailer realized it needed additional capacity to handle these spikes.
“Our previous site was a do-everything-in-one-box kind of system,” said Larry Zilko, VP of IT for Zabar’s. “We used an e-commerce engine called Intershop Infinity, but we also made it do call-center, inventory-management and product-management functions. We also extended it to do functions we originally didn’t have in place.”
Inevitably, it didn’t take long for Zabar’s to outgrow the system. “The Web was changing and there were a lot of opportunities we couldn’t take advantage of,” he said. “It was time to market ourselves better because we were missing out on those opportunities.”
By 2006, sales were increasing at a rate of 20% a year. “We needed to rectify the problems and revamp the site in time for the bustling 2006 holiday period,” Zilko said. “We knew we had to outsource the hosting of the solution, and that it wasn’t going to be something we would directly maintain.”
In April 2006, Zabar’s turned to Woburn, Mass.-based Demandware, a company that provides a flexible on-demand e-commerce platform that integrates with other solutions to enhance the multichannel experience.
As an on-demand service, Demandware provides the infrastructure, management and delivery of e-commerce. This enables retailers to achieve high levels of security, reliability, scalability and site performance without having to invest upfront in expensive infrastructure and personnel. The platform leverages e-commerce software, Web services and highly scalable grid computing and software.
The platform also blends other on-demand applications, such as an order-management module that can be incorporated into a retailer’s call center; a product-recommendation engine for cross-selling related products; e-mail marketing software.