Costco Mobile Commerce
Completed: 2018
Built the mobile web shopping experience for Costco on IBM WebSphere Commerce — responsive UI, REST/JSON APIs, and store-location — tuned to perform against a legacy backend.
The Problem
Costco needed to extend its warehouse-club shopping to mobile, but the IBM WebSphere Commerce stack was built for desktop web. The job: bring responsive design to the site, deliver a fast mobile web experience off the same backend, serve mobile vs. desktop correctly, and wire in the services a mobile shopper needs — without rebuilding the legacy platform.
The Solution
Brought responsive design to Costco's website and redesigned sections for mobile and small screens. Built REST calls and JSON returns with an ajax framework for lazy loading, and integrated the handlebar.js templating framework into Commerce and its JSPs. Set up IHS forwards and Struts logic to serve mobile vs. desktop from the shared platform, integrated Bing for store location, and cut load time by minimizing files and payload size.
The Impact
Delivered the mobile web shopping experience for one of the world's largest retailers, engineered to perform against a legacy WebSphere Commerce backend at Costco scale. Costco runs enormous transaction volume through systems like these — that's Costco's scale, not revenue I generated.