As ecommerce for home goods exploded in popularity during COVID, furniture and DIY retailers looked to find new ways to grow online transaction sizes to in-store levels. Shopping for furniture and home improvement projects has always been challenging online. Furniture, kitchen cabinets, fixtures, and appliances become a part of daily life, are challenging to return, and have a low purchase frequency. Once a shopper makes a decision, they tend to live with it for many years. These are visual, tactile, decisions that require measurements, style choices, budgeting, an understanding of available products, and an involved consideration processes. During the pandemic, retailers turned to 3D to enhance these virtual shopping experiences. 

Inspiration and visualization cultivate confidence

Our 3D Room Commerce company, Marxent offers 3D visualization and configuration solutions that help retailers sell complex, configurable products online through consumer-facing 3D design and visualization apps. The Marxent 3D Room Planner with HD Renders helps shoppers to visualize how furniture or kitchen cabinet configurations will look in the specific floorplan of their home. Founded in 2011, Marxent envisions a world where buying a dining table or remodeling an entire kitchen is as easy as buying a car from Carvana or ordering dinner through  Bite Squad. Our 3D apps create a streamlined inspiration to transaction to advocacy model that cultivates shopper confidence and allows retailers to sell the whole room, not just individual items. 

Using Google Cloud as a foundation, we help some of the largest retail and home goods companies in the world provide exceptional customer journeys. We trust Google Cloud because our clients trust us to make it faster and easier for shoppers to buy semi-custom, configurable projects.

Embracing the power of 3D to super-charge ecommerce 

It’s inarguable: e-commerce is on the rise. More people than ever before are shopping online for furniture, kitchen cabinets, decking, and other large-scale configurable products. 

Customers who design with a retailer, usually buy from them. When shoppers visit stores and showrooms, they find inspiration in merchandised scenes that illustrate how products like sofas, chairs, rugs and lamps work together to accomplish a look. Skilled sales people make suggestions and offer advice on how to put pieces together. They may even work up a quick floor plan to show how multiple items work together in a room. In store, the inspiration phase is intimately tied to consideration and, ultimately, to driving transactions.

By contrast, online shoppers typically start home projects by seeking inspiration and ideas from Pinterest, Instagram and unbranded online image searches. Once they have formed their style preferences, shoppers keep searching to compare products across multiple retailers, plan their project, and put together a final budget. 

To own the whole project sale, retailers need to own the entire inspiration to transaction to advocacy journey. With both online and in-store applications, Retailers leverage Marxent’s 3D Room Planner app to build shopper confidence, capture the whole room sale and win the customer over.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_svOdVvX5LA%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

PRE-RENDERED MID-POLY 3D SCENE

POST-RENDERED MID-POLY 3D SCENE – This is a slightly different angle of the same room that has been rendered into a “Raw Render” (rendered in under 2 minutes).

Through Marxent’s 3D Room Commerce solution, users experience a cyclical inspiration to transaction to advocacy journey. It starts with shoppers viewing inspirational images and media online. Using Marxent’s applications, they can design directly from inspirational images to create a custom, configured space without any product catalog knowledge. Shoppers can visualize the products they love together and in the context of their own floor plan instead of navigating product pages and wondering if items will work together. 

Then, they can add the whole room to a shopping cart with a single click. While this virtual experience does lead to a transaction, it also allows users to save, collaborate on, and share the spaces they’ve created. They become advocates by sharing their projects on social media, starting the inspirational content cycle again. 

Putting an end to manual operations

To deliver renders at scale, Marxent needed to update their cloud render solution. Initially, our 3D Art team operated a manual on-premise render fleet. However, this required many hours of manual setup, configuration, and operation. We also had to manage expensive graphics servers—bare metal, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, HDD, and more. The only solution was to automate the 3D rendering process and empower end-users to rapidly create their own 3D room renders. 

When we were evaluating new solutions, we saw distinct advantages in the Google Cloud Platform that would help them safely and securely scale their business, while strengthening their partnerships with end customers. For example, in moving to Google Cloud, we could automate and scale our rendering process without having to manage fleets of physical servers. We also viewed the platform as an asset due to Google’s secure-by-design infrastructure, agility, data analytics capabilities, and potential for joining the Marketplace.

Creating magical customer experiences that inspire purchase

To provide our customers and shoppers with contextual experiences, Marxent’s applications use mid-poly 3D models that balance speed and realism. These models provide a latency-free, real-time design experience that can be rendered into scenes that are realistic enough to be perceived as photos on social media. 

The complex process of rendering these images requires a combination of efficiency, speed, analytics, and consistent performance that Google Cloud provides. When configured with powerful and speedy gaming GPUs, Marxent can provide fast rendering that meets customers and shopper demands. Here’s a look at our HD Renders application.

Before a user can request an HD Render, they must create a room in the Marxent 3D Room Planner. Once requested, Marxent pulls the saved project from the database and kicks off the process with Cloud Pub/Sub. The project loads into a gaming GPU, using the same platform code running when the user first creates the room in the application. It boots up the app in the cloud to load the room.

The code then scours the space and prepares it for rendering, adjusting texture formats, and adding in lighting. After going through the render engine, the project automatically uploads to Cloud Storage. Finally, the user receives a link to the final product. Throughout, Cloud Pub/Sub handles messages ensuring the right event processes are happening, such as rendering success or failure.

Using this process, it’s possible to create dozens of images out of a single scene, trading products in and out of a floor plan by leveraging a complete catalog of content geometries and covers, textures, and finishes.

Utilizing Google Cloud throughout the buying journey 

Today, Marxent’s applications power world-class retailers with AR, VR, and 3D commerce experiences. We use cutting-edge graphics hardware to create renderings in less than 2 minutes per screenshot, often much faster. We’re also saving money as we no longer have to manage expensive servers or purchase expensive hardware upfront. Our clients are happier because we have passed on the cost savings to them while now having limitless scaling capabilities to meet demand.

By partnering with Google Cloud, Marxent can confidently offer our customers secure applications built on infrastructure with advanced security tools that support compliance and data confidentiality. Backed by a globally consistent platform, we can also help brands build reliable purchasing experiences across customer touchpoints—without fear of downtime during peak sales periods. This strategic partnership has allowed us to provide a best-in-breed, customer-first experience that our customers demand while providing the reliability that our partners expect.

With customers demanding seamless shopping experiences, Marxent’s 3D technologies open doors to new, easier, more convenient, and more satisfying shopping experiences that empower consumers to buy the right products the first time. 

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As we enter the holiday season, retailers are working behind the scenes to ensure they can provide the best experiences for customers, in store and online. Challenges in retail do not begin or end during the holiday season as sudden shifts in customer preferences, supply chain nuances, and overall demand ebbs and flows take place year round and retailers must be prepared to adapt swiftly.

Google Cloud’s retail customers globally, in total, saw more online traffic in the first six months of 2022 than all of 2019. This year, retailers can expect an early launch to holiday shopping activities, as 50% of consumers plan to start purchasing goods before the traditional Black Friday kick-off.

The very same improvements made to automate and improve retail infrastructure can prepare it for holiday surges and support year-round innovation. Let’s take a look at how Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the U.S., is partnering with Google Cloud, MongoDB Atlas, commercetools, and HCLTech to cover these two areas and more.

Architecting for innovation

Creating personalized shopping experiences in stores and online is key to Ulta Beauty’s success. This commitment is best demonstrated through Ulta Beauty’s Virtual Beauty Advisor. Built on Google Cloud, this tool enhances shoppers’ experiences with personalized recommendations in addition to the ability to try on makeup virtually with GLAMLab.

As innovators in support of the best possible guest experience, Ulta Beauty needed to re-architect its infrastructure for greater agility and stability.

To start, Ulta Beauty chose to use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the backbone and orchestrator to build and deploy cloud-native applications. The Google Cloud deployments coincided with an organizational move from end-to-end application development to one that focuses on individual features, specific modules, and micro-applications.

This strategic change allowed Ulta Beauty to fix bugs, experiment with new offerings, and drive customer experiences faster and more efficiently. Thanks to the transformation and GKE, Ulta Beauty’s developer team now accelerates time to market for new products and services, and delivers new ways to engage with customers more quickly. These efforts all ladder to create ‘WOW’ experiences for the retailers’ guests who have emotional and personal connections to beauty and wellness. They can now discover and experience products that are served to them based on individual preferences.

Adapting to the new environment comes with its own set of challenges. “Microservices are not a silver bullet,” says Sethu Madhav Vure, IT Architect, Ulta Beauty. “For Ulta Beauty, the biggest challenge was how to break up a monolithic environment into multiple applications. We had to evolve our core systems—without impacting today’s services—and address what was needed for the future.”

Google Cloud partner HCLTech provided expert guidance throughout the re-architecting process, defining the solution blueprint and cloud-native deployment architecture through cross-functional workshops. HCLTech then assisted with the actual migration and platform setup, paving the way for fully automated, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to support faster rollouts and deployment architecture to drive higher availability and scalability.

Ulta Beauty took a domain-driven design approach to identify operations that could be grouped together to reduce complexity and improve scalability. Now, the applications are based on multiple domains, such as Commerce, Promotions, Catalog, Order, Customer, and Inventory. The new architecture prompted a fresh look at storage requirements to scale dynamically alongside its modernized applications.

For Ulta Beauty, MongoDB Atlas proved to be the best database solution for dynamic scaling, ease-of-use, and integrations with Google Cloud. The company also leveraged an entry-level plan to prove the value of MongoDB Atlas before investing in the technology.

“MongoDB Atlas offers a free tier that gave us an opportunity to quickly demonstrate tangible benefits of a proof of concept,” says Vure. “Once we proved the value of MongoDB Atlas, we benefited from the straightforward resource allocation supported by Google Cloud and MongoDB.”

Integrations between MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud allow Ulta Beauty to take an iterative approach to new projects. The company creates new clusters in an existing project, then piggybacks them onto an existing Private Service Connect setup between a MongoDB project and Google Cloud project.

By removing complexities within infrastructure management, Ulta Beauty can manage its incredible amount of data, such as member preferences and purchases, that fuels its event-driven architecture. The much more agile infrastructure enables Ulta Beauty to deploy and scale offerings faster than ever.

“We recently had an unplanned traffic surge that impacted our domain services. It took less than an hour for MongoDB Atlas to scale up to the next level of the cluster and manage that traffic,” says Vure. “The on-demand, dynamic scaling, plus GKE, has saved the day more than once.”

Preparing for a happy holiday season

This holiday season, Ulta Beauty has a stronger technical foundation to manage demand surges and provide customers seamless shopping experiences. Previously, the company used 50 pods in a cluster, each with 6 GB of RAM without domain stores, to handle about 100 transactions each second. With domain stores, the same 6 GB of RAM with just 20 GKE pods was able to scale up to 2,400 transactions per second.

With Google Cloud as its technology foundation, Ulta Beauty partnered with Google Cloud partner commercetools to evolve its application APIs as products and properly separate interfaces and capabilities.

Ulta Beauty uses event-based integrations within commercetools to identify how best to leverage Cloud Pub/Sub middleware on top of MongoDB Atlas integrations. Patterns established here were extended into MongoDB change streams and in turn improved business processes.

“Working with the right technology partners has helped us to avoid analysis paralysis that can happen when developer teams spend a lot of time trying to understand and manage every detail,” says Vure. “Instead, we convert a proof of concept into a working solution, and quickly bring it to market. It’s been a major shift in our IT culture as we try out new things weekly and see incredible support from leadership.”

The improvements enable Ulta Beauty to maintain a high level of innovation, performance, and customer service year-round. Now, when the holiday shopping season begins, Ulta Beauty is prepared to handle surges in traffic through auto-scaling with Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas. Customers get what they want, when they want, free from the frustrations of outages.

“With these changes, we are ready for a holiday season that everyone–even those of us in IT—gets to enjoy. We’re positioned to continuously focus on new, better ways to serve our guests,” says Vure.

Check out MongoDB and commercetools on Google Cloud Marketplace to learn more about what these partners can do for your business.

In 2013, long before the world was discussing clean energy and sustainable practices, two IIT Madras graduates — Swapnil Jain and Tarun Mehta — had an idea to develop India’s first-ever electrical scooter.

This was at a time when auto manufacturers were still focusing on fossil-fuel-driven vehicles and ‘eco-friendly’ mobility solutions were more a trendy alternative catering to a niche market.

The duo founded Ather Energy in 2013 and launched their first fully-electric scooter, the Ather S340, in Bengaluru in 2016. Since then, the company has released several new models into the market and is planning to expand to eight more cities by the end of the year.

To support the smooth running of their vehicles, lower costs, improve time to market, and create great customer experience, Ather turned to Google Cloud.

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