BUILDING SOLUTIONS FOR TOMORROW

Building technology-driven
E-Commerce with LetsShave,
India’s First Shaving Club.

LetsShave Private Limited

Chandigarh
Punjab, India

OVERVIEW

LetsShave.com started in 2015, poised to be India’s first Shaving Club addressing the needs of men and women alike. The idea was to build an experience similar to Dollar Shave Club in India, targeting the growing urban population that was buying online.

The goal was to build an e-commerce platform for LetsShave that could scale quickly and be flexible with changing business needs.

SOLUTION

We started engaging with LetsShave while in their nascent stage. After multiple rounds of discussions, we agreed to build a proprietary platform instead of opting for already available Open-Source platforms such as WooCommerce or Magento. The key reasons why we pitched proprietary were –

This business model was new in India, our platform needed to evolve and adapt quickly to refine it for the Indian audience. So we wanted to keep our overheads small.
Flexibility goes for a toss with existing platforms because you are relying on either hacky customizations or untested plugins to get the job done.
Security was a big concern, as the open-source platforms are vulnerable to Zero-day exploits or even a single vulnerable plugin can lay down the entire platform.
We knew we had to build at scale, which required building automation in all aspects
Support, Logistics, Tax Compliance, Business Intelligence – this wouldn’t have been workable with the open-source platforms.

In 3 months from the start, we launched the first version for LetsShave.com offering their world-class razors for Men. The products were well accepted by the Indian audience, which kickstarted the next phase for LetsShave.

SCALING UP

Handling the growing traffic with an efficient & cost-effective approach

Based on the positive response in the pilot phase, LetsShave started an aggressive digital marketing campaign over Facebook and Google.

The first step as part of scaling up was to be able to handle this variable amount of traffic which was dependent on the promotional reach set by the marketers.

We choose to move the entire infrastructure of the platform to AWS to leverage its dynamic scaling benefits. Using AWS we set up auto-balancing to dynamically scale up and scale down our web servers based on the increasing or decreasing traffic. This solved three things for us –

Our infrastructure system automatically detected issues with our servers and replaced them with new ones immediately without any intervention from our end. So our uptime was always 99.99%.
The auto-balancing only created new servers when the traffic increased beyond set thresholds, this helped us stay cost-efficient in terms of our AWS spend as we did not unused server capacity wasted during low traffic hours.
Because we were only continually developing, this architecture helped us do a rolling deployment on the servers which resulted in zero-downtime.

Automating the shipping of 1000+ orders in a day

LetsShave relied on multiple delivery partners based on the serviceable zip-codes and payment methods (Cash-on-delivery being the predominant). Now manually shipping 1000+ orders every day was not a feasible activity in terms of human resources required and the time consumption.

To solve this challenge, we built a fully automated shipment pipeline which as output generated and stored the shipping label and the invoice for the package in our system well before the packaging and shipping process at the physical warehouse started. The labels and invoices were also grouped and split based on the actual shelving in the warehouse, which increased packaging efficiency.

As the APIs were already integrated, the delivery partner just picked up the shipments without any need for additional paperwork.

Building a lightning-fast website, optimizing every aspect

Amazon’s study showed that an additional latency of 100ms cost them 1% in sales.

Website Performance and Usability was always a big concern and we actively worked in optimizing the same to the best of our capabilities. Some of the major enhancements we did –

Using Content Delivery Network (CDN) exhaustively to cache almost everything on the website
Using caching on our server to improve response times.
Radical and unconventional methods to optimize client-side code.

We even implemented AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for the Blog to increase viewership. Our Google Pagespeed scores then had exceeded 90 on both Mobile & Desktop devices.

On the order process, we also implemented a single-click order confirmation process for the repeat customers. This helped increase repeat conversions significantly.

Bringing analytics and insights into business decisions

While the new customer base started growing rapidly, it became more important to design marketing strategies to increase repeat business from existing customers.

The challenge was – customers will run out of blades eventually, and instead of moving back to the retail choice the platform had to make it convenient for you to order again from LetsShave. So we had to find out when they would likely run out of blades and provide them an easier way to reorder at the correct time.

To solve this, we designed and set up an Analytics Warehouse for LetsShave that ran deep analytics such as item buying frequency, customer behaviour in subsequent purchases and cohort-based retention analysis to identify the correct segment of customers to target for repeat purchase.

The Warehouse eventually became the core of the LetsShave decision-making process in terms of their affiliate, social media, and email marketing user segmentation and spends.

Empowering Customer Support & Compliance Teams

As a step in further automation, we bridged the gap between the Customer Support’s CRM Tool and our E-Commerce Console by doing a deeper integration within our console for the support team.

Some of the features in the console designed for better customer support included – full visibility of the order status, ability to create and update orders within clicks and also collect payments by generating links.

In addition, we also built multiple automation for compliance such as automated excise invoice generation, integration with their on-premise accounting software and reconciliation of returned shipments and cancellations.

“We have been working with Actonate for over a year now and as our business grows, customer demands change and the Actonate team is able to deliver work at the same pace. The Actonate team is fully committed to our business and growth. Whenever there has been any issue we have seen immediate resolution right from their top management.”

Mr. Siddharth Oberoi, Founder
LetsShave.com

OUTCOME

In a short span of 2 years, LetsShave crossed the 1000+ orders barrier and built a brand presence across the country and a core team strength of more than 100. Some of their milestones include –

In 2016, they were awarded Most Promising Brand by WCRC.

In 2018, they became the first company that Dorco (South Korean Razor manufacturer) invested in, to build a bigger market in India.

Our journey with LetsShave as a technology partner ended in 2017 as we had accomplished all set goals and had automated all parts of their operations. We now cater to LetsShave as consultants assisting them in long-term technology decisions.

Today LetsShave invests more in their core business – supply chain and brand rather than technology because you always build solutions for tomorrow.