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Abercrombie & Fitch
How Abercrombie has achieved successful holiday shopping readiness every year since 2010
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reduction in test design and maintenance time
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orders per hour simulated across 40 eCommerce sites
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increase in backend traffic capacity
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Company overview
Headquartered in New Albany, Ohio, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. is a Fortune 1000 specialty fashion retailer with over 730 stores worldwide, and three offshoot brands under management, including Hollister Co., abercrombie kids, and Gilly Hicks.
In the retail sector, survival depends on the ability to adapt quickly to customer needs. Most recently, every retailer has had to grapple with the sudden seismic shift in consumer behavior due to the COVID-related social-distancing mandates and stay-at-home orders. Online shopping has skyrocketed, and customers increasingly demand a fast and reliable digital experience every time, from anywhere, on any device. While these new habits accelerated trends already under way, PwC research shows that these changes are here to stay. Excellent digital performance has become a do-or-die competitive differentiator.
Abercrombie has always been at the forefront of reading the market and reacting to customers’ evolving needs. Its digital footprint includes 40+ eCommerce desktop and mobile sites, a volume that calls for constant focus and effort to maintain performance at every turn. But it was well prepared to meet the digital transformation onslaught — digital helped the company realize its best income performance in over a decade. Digital sales grew by 39% in 2020, to $1.7 billion — more than half of total sales.
- Industry: Retail
- Organization size: 20,000 employees
- Location: Global
- Products:
Preparing for online holiday shopping peaks
Probably nothing challenges eCommerce performance engineers as much as preparing for the holiday shopping season. The stakes are high, and systems are ever more complex. Consider:
- As much as 20–30% of a retailer’s annual revenue can come from the holiday season
- Over half of visitors abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load — and 80% of them will never come back
- 57% of customers stop buying from a company permanently because a competitor provides a better experience
- Each customer transaction hits at least 82 different technologies — any one of which could be a single point of failure, create a bottleneck, or degrade customer experience
Ajay Pedhagandham, Quality Assurance Manager at Abercrombie & Fitch, manages the performance testing team and is responsible for performance test automation. Most important, he’s been at the helm leading the company’s holiday readiness testing team for the past eight years. He notes that any page-response delay, even for a second, can mean the difference between growth and loss. To prepare for the peak traffic loads, his team has to simulate tens of thousands of orders per hour to ensure readiness. He adds, “Our customers are socially active influencers — a bad shopping experience can lead to a firestorm of negative conversation, which can quickly tarnish the brand.”
