userwerk: Giving online shop customers a little extra with agile point-of-purchase marketing
About userwerk
userwerk provides online marketing at point of purchase for online shops, converting inactive traffic into revenue and offering customers a positive exit experience.
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About Claranet
Claranet is a hosted service provider specializing in migration and managed services and is among the highest accredited multi-cloud providers worldwide.
userwerk implements Google Kubernetes Engine on Google Cloud to power its Spryker Commerce OS microshop for point-of-purchase marketing, getting its platform online in just 10 weeks.
Google Cloud results
- Enables agile development to bring an integrated microshop platform to market in just 10 weeks
- Creates a stable infrastructure with an uptime of 99.993%, to make sure traffic continues to be monetized
- Delivers excellent customer experience with a response time of 15 ms and a time-to-interact of under 800 ms
Supports several deployments per day
Within a physical store, the checkout is an ideal retail position for impulse buys and little extras. Point of purchase (POP) marketing enables online stores to enhance their customers’ exit experience by offering a little extra, such as a free newspaper or product sample. Founded in 2017, German startup userwerk sources products from vendors who are interested in offering marketing samples and works with some of the biggest online retailers in the German-speaking market, such as Media Markt.
“We founded userwerk to bring competition into a monopolized market. The challenge was to be agile and get the platform up and running as quickly as possible, as well as create a really great user experience for customers, with a highly available, scalable architecture.”
—Markus Kalb, CEO and founder, userwerk“Our microshop is integrated with the checkout page of the retailer, and one of our differentiators is the quality of the products we source from our vendors, which offer a positive customer experience without any hidden subscriptions,” explains Markus Kalb, CEO and founder of userwerk. “As we pay the online retailers for every impression, our conversion rate is very important, and the window of opportunity for attracting customer attention is small: we need to be ready to interact in under 800 ms.”
userwerk wanted to create an infrastructure to answer its performance criteria in terms of scalability and availability. Working with implementation partner Claranet and digital agency Turbine Kreuzberg, a containerized infrastructure on Google Cloud has been the right choice for the job.
“We founded userwerk to bring competition into a monopolized market,” says Markus. “The challenge was to be agile and get the platform up and running as quickly as possible, as well as create a really great user experience for customers, with a highly available, scalable architecture.”
“One of the big advantages of Google Kubernetes Engine is the ability to scale up instantly. For example, when one of our retail partners doubled its traffic, our infrastructure handled it without any issues.”
—Markus Kalb, CEO and founder, userwerkCreating a scalable infrastructure in just 10 weeks
When your profit depends on conversions, it’s imperative that your technology is fast and reliable. As its microshop is integrated within its retail partners’ websites, userwerk’s platform faces a number of technical challenges. “We don’t have any ability to steer how much traffic we get, especially around peaks such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday,” explains Markus. “That means we need to be able to easily scale to meet demand. The platform also has to be highly available, as we still have to pay for impressions even when the microshop is not working.”
To meet those challenges, userwerk chose Google Cloud to host its Spryker Commerce OS using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), as well as Cloud Storage, Cloud Load Balancing, and Cloud DNS. “We started developing the infrastructure with Claranet in January, and it took three weeks to build the development environment in Google Cloud,” explains Markus. “Then, the Turbine Kreuzberg team developed the Spryker-based microshop in around seven weeks. It took just 10 weeks to go from zero to serving our first customers online.”
Having built and launched the product in 19 weeks, four months later, userwerk’s infrastructure was handling a five-figure monthly order volume. “One of the big advantages of Google Kubernetes Engine is the ability to scale up instantly,” says Markus. “For example, when one of our retail partners doubled its traffic, our infrastructure handled it without any issues.”
Building an agile DevOps pipeline
One of userwerk’s other demands was the ability to create an agile DevOps pipeline that would accommodate the needs of its three development teams. “As well as working with Turbine Kreuzberg on our Spryker deployment, we have a development team in-house and also work with another development company in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Those three companies all use the same pipeline for testing and development.”
“Google Cloud offers the high level of visibility and control required to make that work, and thanks to Kubernetes, we’re able to have at least one production deployment every day. That includes multiple daily deployments if necessary,” says Markus.
“We have response times of around 15 ms, which keeps us under our 800 ms time-to-interact target. That keeps our conversion rates where they need to be. And our uptime so far has been 99.993%.”
—Markus Kalb, CEO and founder, userwerkDelivering performance, disrupting the market
Thanks to Google Cloud, userwerk’s infrastructure is able to deliver the performance it needs to keep the business profitable. “We have response times of around 15 ms, which keeps us under our 800 ms time-to-interact target,” says Markus. “That keeps our conversion rates where they need to be. And our uptime so far has been 99.993%.”
Now, userwerk is planning to start using machine learning to further improve the customer exit experience. “We want to start using personalized recommendations to individually tailor what we offer customers,” says Markus. “We’re already working on another project using TensorFlow, and we want to explore what Google Cloud can offer us in terms of machine learning.”
The company also plans to expand geographically beyond Germany to Austria and Switzerland. “Our experience is a great example of how, with the right technology, it’s possible to be incredibly agile and disrupt an established market in a number of weeks,” says Markus. “With the help of our partners and their technical support, we’ve been able to do that.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About userwerk
userwerk provides online marketing at point of purchase for online shops, converting inactive traffic into revenue and offering customers a positive exit experience.
About Claranet
Claranet is a hosted service provider specializing in migration and managed services and is among the highest accredited multi-cloud providers worldwide.