Challenge

Mamas & Papas is a much-loved baby brand, providing high-quality, award-winning products designed in the UK, available in its stores and on its website. The team also provides expert advice to its community, helping parents make the most of life with a little one. 

Despite difficult trading conditions for the retail sector overall, Mamas & Papas is bucking the trend with an upturn in in-store purchases and online. In 2021, the brand moved to a new e-commerce platform, Shopify, and wanted to ensure the transition was smooth. This was essential to maintain their first-rate customer service levels and provide a great online shopping experience. Ahead of the busy Black Friday period, the firm wanted to ensure the new platform wouldn’t affect the website’s user experience and performance for their community of parents, with the increase in website traffic.

Solution

RapidSpike was appointed to monitor the brand’s transition from its previous e-commerce platform, to Shopify, initially monitoring a test environment prior to it being live. 

RapidSpike created synthetic user journeys and set up monitors alongside the Mamas & Papas team. These monitors test that customers are able to select products and check out smoothly, which are the most important functions on the site. The user journeys were increased to every 15 minutes ahead of Black Friday, to make sure there were no issues, and the site was tested regularly to ensure it was working correctly, without performance being hindered.

Alongside this, RapidSpike collected a suite of performance data including Page Load tests, Web Vitals, and Google Lighthouse. These monitors complement the user journeys by providing a full monitoring suite to ensure the site is functional and performing well.

The services we provide day-to-day, are monitoring the user journeys to make sure the scripts are up to date and making any changes if needed or requested. Although Mamas & Papas is quickly alerted to failures, RapidSpike also investigates and assists where possible – whether that be in interpreting the data or manually checking that we can replicate the issues flagged in the journey.

One of the main concerns Mamas & Papas wanted to mitigate was the monitoring of all the website third-party integrations, especially during the checkout process. The company makes several ‘calls’ externally to various sources along the user journey. For example, when the customer is at the checkout, and wants to pick a specific delivery date, then this ‘calls’ a third party. Mamas & Papas doesn’t have direct control over the external source but needs to know if this process starts failing, so they can quickly rectify it. This helps to both prevent poor user experience and protect revenue, depending on what’s not working.

In 2022, Mamas & Papas launched “My Account” which is new functionality on its website which enables customers to check their order status, make part payments, and manage their details. This went live in September, ready for the key retail month of Black Friday in November, when there are typically sales and discounts throughout the month. RapidSpike checks key website data including load speeds, performance, and Web Vitals to help Mamas & Papas navigate the busy shopping period. These checks alert the business to any issues which could result in customers leaving the website due to poor performance.

Key Results

Mamas & Papas has found the management tools, dashboards, and alerts straightforward to use as well as the synthetic user journey dashboard easy to both edit and manage their key journeys. Any requests are quickly acted upon by the RapidSpike customer service team.

The brand has a number of key user journeys that go right through to checkout, and these are crucial to ensure the smooth running of the website. The company also has a lot of customisation at the checkout end, so it’s important for its internal teams to be able to quickly see if it’s taking longer to load than usual, or elements from third parties are not displaying properly. 

Mamas & Papas has alerts from RapidSpike set up. These are invaluable for the brand, especially with the screen-shot functionality, immediately showing where the issue is. Without RapidSpike, this would have taken much longer to identify, potentially leading to lost business. The organisation can now resolve issues quickly, even if out of hours.

Mamas & Papas estimates that if a web issue isn’t solved quickly, this could cost the business several thousands of pounds per hour, if the website, or an element of it, is down.