How to Successfully Grow an Online Marketplace

For most ecommerce traders, Black Friday is the biggest event of the year. But for Thortful, the first online greeting card marketplace, the big three are: Valentine's Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. Every year on and around these days, Thortful might sell up to thirty cards per second – that means that even a minute of downtime could cost the company thousands of pounds.

Of course, this wasn’t always a problem for Thortful. When it launched in 2015, with the unique idea of providing a platform for creators that would market, print on-demand, and sell their art and return a royalty, Thortful was only selling a card or two per day. Its tech stack and team were, appropriately, quite small. But fast forward a couple of years and the marketplace was selling up to 1,000 cards a day.

Operations needed to scale up accordingly, which meant the tech stack began to get more complex as Thortful embraced microservices. But with a bigger stack can come bigger problems; the resulting dependencies can end up complicating development and lead to increased downtime. And for Thortful, providing a great customer experience has always been essential.

It quickly became apparent that it needed to start taking observability seriously. Being able to monitor the entire stack from a single pane of glass in real time means that Thortful’s engineers can easily understand the performance of the whole business’ digital infrastructure on AWS. So, Thortful’s CTO and founder contacted a New Relic rep, and the two businesses have been working together ever since.

Improving customer experiences 

The complexity of the stack behind Thortful’s online presence means there are plenty of moving parts.  When they all function properly, they provide a frictionless customer experience but any issues can lead quickly to latency and downtime.

Using New Relic’s platform, not only can Thortful resolve any issues more quickly than before, but it can also get out ahead of any potential issues that may impact customers. The business’ philosophy is that they don’t want customers reporting issues, its engineers should be the first to know.

The business has several endpoints on its critical path, and it uses New Relic to run multiple synthetic scripts that look at how the end user interacts with its site. Not only can they monitor response times from Thortful’s app to its APIs impacting the customer experience, they can also correlate technical performance to conversion rates. This reduces friction but also protects revenue.

Coming top of searches

Thortful’s unique business model has seen it scale up significantly in the past few years – helped behind the scenes by New Relic. And as word-of-mouth grows, it is also important that Thortful can be easily found online.

As with any online business, Google Core Web Vitals has become a key concern for Thortful, as it gauges the overall user experience of its website, which can influence their SEO rankings. If the website doesn’t score highly enough, then nobody will find them organically online, and more money would have to be poured into marketing.

Thortful uses New Relic to monitor the CWV metrics. Each quarter they have a range of KPIs, and once they have a baseline, they put an alert on it, using New Relic dashboards as their single source of truth. With this, Thortful’s frontend engineers can visualise trends and make decisions to improve the performance of the website.  

Being prepared

New Relic is also a key factor in helping Thortful scale its go-to-market strategy. Now they can fix issues on-the-go; Thortful’s observability practice has matured to the stage where they can use distributed tracing to troubleshoot issues – giving themselves an easy way to capture, visualise and analyse traces through different services in their architecture.

With all the telemetry collated into one system, Thortful can see the entirety of its end-to-end service dependencies, and then understand if they will affect its customers. This often results in finding issues that aren’t located where the team initially thought they would be.

This data also allows Thortful to plan ahead. By using the telemetry New Relic collects at each of their peak traffic periods, Thortful can understand how to prepare for the next one. This means everything from a better understanding of the stack, to being able to use critical data gathered from previous high-traffic events that will allow them to prevent downtime – thereby increasing sales.

Continued growth

The future looks bright for Thortful. Every year the team is increasingly prepared for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. But keeping all its different plates spinning requires complete visibility over Thortful’s platform.

Uptime and speed are especially important for high-volume, low-price businesses like Thortful – whereas businesses selling fewer, but higher price, items may have less to lose with a second or two of latency. But while the business side of things is important, for Thortful, the customer genuinely comes first. So, whether you’re looking for a last-minute card, or something more planned out, ensuring that you have a frictionless customer experience is Thortful’s number one priority.