Modular Consignment Experience
<p>An efficient solution to help sellers manage their consignments at Christie's</p>
Services & Technologies Involved
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. <span class="TextRun SCXW263047137 BCX8"><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW263047137 BCX8">Christie’s help <strong>sellers</strong> with <strong>getting the best possible offers</strong> for their objects of art and <strong>buyers</strong> in <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 <strong>check on the current status </strong>of the Consignment, <strong>track individual steps</strong> in Consignments</span> processing, and <strong>review the history </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> performant application</strong> that requires the minimum amount of maintenance and is independent of legacy systems. Therefore</span><span class="NormalTextRun BCX8 SCXW79418495"> it can be<strong> utilized in any future version </strong>of the "My Account" application.</span></p>
High availability
<p>A <strong>scalable solution</strong> is exceptional for its availability, security, and high performance under any load. The solution is highly resilient to data center failures.</p>
Cost-effectiveness
<p>We optimized the operating and maintenance costs by utilizing <a href="https://www.actumdigital.com/technologies/aws">Amazon Web Services</a> and provided Christie's <strong>total control and transparency over the spending</strong>.</p>
Modularity
<p>Fully <strong>independent</strong> of the legacy system, the application can be easily adapted to the client's future needs. <strong>Modularity</strong> allows for easy upgrades or extensions of the client zone app.</p>
Services & Technologies
- Our Services
- Our Technologies
Having explored how this modular solution enhances the user experience for sellers, you may also be interested in seeing how we approached the broader site architecture by examining the Christie's website reimagined. This project highlights our strategy for rebuilding the Christie's website to ensure seamless integration across all digital touchpoints. To view the complete portfolio of our work with this client, please visit the full list of Christie's success stories.