Today we announced the implementation of a new US website for Regatta Group’s brand Craghoppers, and new sites (in the UK and US) for the clothing brand range named after adventurer Bear Grylls.

This announcement follows the successful launch in 2008 of websites for three of Regatta’s brands in the UK (Craghoppers, Dare2b and Hawkshead), which leverage SAFE™ (Salmon’s Application Framework for eCommerce). SAFE™ was selected by Regatta as they wanted a strategic platform which would support the whole group, as well as their international expansion plans.

Chris Bulmer, Group IT Director at Regatta said, “The UK websites have been a contributing factor to our success during 2008 and 2009, we are seeing significant cost savings as a result of the new platform, as well as an increase in sales, and we were keen to replicate this in the US. We have been very impressed with how quickly and easily Salmon were able to bring our additional brands online. We are confident we made the right decision selecting Salmon’s eCommerce solution SAFE™ and the IBM WebSphere Commerce platform. To date, it has met all our eCommerce needs and we are certain it will continue to do so as our requirements develop in line with our customers’ demands.”

The new sites developed by Salmon leverage IBM WebSphere Commerce and its extended sites functionality, which allows customers to launch new sites quickly and easily. Considerable amounts of development time and spend are saved because all the sites sit on one instance of IBM WebSphere Commerce and the majority of the data and business logic is shared. Regatta are also benefiting from having Salmon integrate IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce. Regatta’s call centre representatives now have access to the same database as that used on the websites. Everything is shared between the two channels including product imagery, pricing and promotions as well as cross and up selling of information, leading to improved productivity of call centre employees, increased sales and improved service for cross-channel customers. Further benefits include considerable reduced IT cost and complexity.

eCommerce Internationalisation has many challenges. Read on to see how Regatta made sure that their technical infrastructure would scale to meet the new demands from the additional sites in the US and that the speed and functionality wasn’t put at risk.