Skip to content
Actum Digital
Go to country page
Go to country page

Modular Consignment Experience

<p>An efficient solution to help sellers manage their consignments at Christie's</p>
Woman in a gallery

Services & Technologies Involved

Services:

Technologies:

Need a hand with your collection?

<p><strong>Christie's</strong> is one of the world's largest auction houses with a long history of connecting art and collections to buyers connoisseurs worldwide.&nbsp;<span class="TextRun SCXW263047137 BCX8"><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW263047137 BCX8">Christie’s help&nbsp;<strong>sellers</strong> with&nbsp;<strong>getting the best possible offers</strong> for their objects of art and&nbsp;<strong>buyers</strong> in&nbsp;<strong>finding the best artwork purchase</strong>.</span></span></p>

Legacy Technology

<p>Christie’s used to have a legacy “My Account” application that used legacy technology stack and showed sub-optimal performance. Costs associated with extending the functionality were too high due to the limited scalability of the application, and mobile users were limited by responsiveness.</p>

Challenges

<p>The monolithic solution prevented Christie’s from adding new functionalities or updating the existing ones easily. There was very limited documentation available, and thus any adjustments to the source code posed a significant risk. These challenges were overcome thanks to the dedicated support of Christie's Business Stakeholders throughout the entire project.</p>

Product Goal

<p>ACTUM applied a budget-conscious approach creating a modular extension of the existing “My Account” section. The goal was to build a Consignment section that can be used independently of the legacy solution and re-used in the new “My Account” section. The Consignment section provides a consistent brand experience for the customers, and would, for the first time, allow sellers to view and manage aspects of their selling activity at Christie's. In the past this has all been managed offline with physical paperwork and communication.</p>

The new solution

<p>The Consignment Experience module was injected into the legacy web application in the form of the React micro-frontend single-page application consuming data from the Amazon Web Services AppSync. Both front-end and back-end applications adopted continuous integration and delivery to maximize the automatization and testability of the produced builds. Serverless tools from AWS were chosen to ensure automatic management of the application’s scalability and ease of management.</p>

An elegant way forward

In order to reduce the number of side effects for the users, Christie’s and ACTUM have used the legacy system as a proxy for authentication utilizing a custom, cookie-based authentication approach across the legacy system. Utilization of the JSON Web Tokens across applications is envisioned in the future, which will be adopted in the Consignment Experience Module as well.

Benefits for clients

<p><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW239452435 BCX8">The "My Account" section of Christie's website now offers a transparent and always available, self-service way to&nbsp;<strong>check on the current status&nbsp;</strong>of the Consignment,&nbsp;<strong>track individual steps</strong> in Consignments</span> processing, and <strong>review the history&nbsp;</strong>of past Consignment that Christie’s helped the client to sell.</p><p><span class="NormalTextRun BCX8 SCXW79418495">By now, business users in Christie’s can make use of a<strong>&nbsp;performant application</strong> that requires the minimum amount of maintenance and is independent of legacy systems. Therefore</span><span class="NormalTextRun BCX8 SCXW79418495">&nbsp;it can be<strong>&nbsp;utilized in any future version&nbsp;</strong>of the "My Account" application.</span></p>

Services & Technologies

About cookies on this site

<p data-pasted="true">We use cookies to collect and analyse information on site performance and usage, to provide social media features and to enhance and customise content and advertisements.</p><p></p>