A peek into Myntra’s technology preparedness for the End Of Reason Sale (EORS)

Please elaborate on the indispensable role of technology in hosting End of Reason Sale, (EORS)
At Myntra, technology is at the forefront not just for marquee events but also during BAU to ensure we render delightful, consistent and predictable shopping experiences to our customers. All marquee events at Myntra are at multiple times magnitude of BAU scale, which requires meticulous planning and close collaboration among tech, business & operations counterparts to understand the demand & traffic patterns, inventory distribution across fulfilment models, delivery promise SLAs, etc and start preparing our systems by conducting rigorous scale testing & dry runs simulating actual peaks & concurrency to ensure readiness for the event.

We have a detailed monitoring, reporting and alerting mechanism in place. Especially for events such as these, we set up virtual control rooms with a robust incident management process and engineers on call for proactive support and immediate response to issues.

A number of new product features were launched and scaled in this edition of EORS. For example, MLive, Myntra Studio, In-session similar product recommendations on PDP, personalized coupons, revamped search, a more accurate promise engine, faster speed including air shipping for some categories, etc.

Tech has also played a huge role in ensuring seamless onboarding of marketplace sellers, optimizing inventory placement across locations, launching new Omni stores, onboarding new MENSA partners (Myntra Extended Network of Service Augmentation ie, Kirana store partners) for scaling last mile deliveries and data platforms ingesting and processing large volumes of data at scale for data analysis and decision making in real time.

Myntra is geared to handle 15,000 orders per minute at peak to offer a smooth and delightful shopping experience for users this EORS. What is the kind of infrastructure (Software, hardware and application) preparedness required?
A high-performing and reliable platform is key to providing consistent user experience as we scale up to 15K orders per minute during peak, this EORS. We go through a rigorous platform certification process to ascertain the platform reliability and performance. As part of ongoing engineering excellence initiatives, we evaluate systems against anticipated traffic and take proactive measures to re-architect our systems as necessary. We ensure all the services are designed to individually scale to handle the peak traffic. We use a customized load testing tool which runs multiple end-to-end load test scenarios and provides performance metrics for all applications, systems and databases. We use rate limiters and circuit breakers to make our systems more reliable.

We also employ autoscaling to handle the spike in incoming data to crunch near-real time analytics for powering business analysis and engaging customer experiences. In addition, we work with our infrastructure partners to make sure that they are fully geared up for the upcoming traffic. It is quite a collaborative effort among systems, application, databases and infrastructure teams to make sure that our platform scales to provide the seamless and cutting edge shopping experience our customers expect of us.

What is the kind of personalization, technology-driven fashion insights that you will offer to the customers ?
During this edition of EORS we have significantly ramped up our ability to make personalized recommendations to customers so that they can quickly discover what they need. We offer personalization along two dimensions: time scale of data and depth. Our personalization algorithms take into consideration deep understanding of the user, deep understanding of the products and expertise in fashion and trends. In addition to cohort based personalization, we provide individual customer-specific recommendations, which means each of our millions of users will see a recommendation slate that’s specifically optimized for them.

On the time scale we not only look at past purchases and browsing patterns to understand preferences, but we also look at activities in the current session such as searches, add to cart events, etc that tell us about near real-time user preferences.  We hope all of this will lead to a truly game changing superlative experience for the user that Myntra has always been loved for.

Please share your views on the upcoming technologies for 2022, gamification and the recently launched M-Mall and M-live on the app
Myntra will continue to strengthen its position as a preferred fashion destination in 2022 with innovative tech deployments to ensure its users have a superlative shopping experience. We were amongst the first platforms to offer content based commerce when we launched studio last year. We saw strong adoption from our customers. We further built on this with the launch of MLive this year to offer a live video streaming experience which was built completely in-house. Through this platform hundreds of influencers and brands are able to connect directly with our customers providing rich experiences and value for our customers.

We launched MMall last year offering our brand partners to showcase their brand stores on our platform with their own unique branding. For our brand conscious customers this offers a store like experience to get the products of their favorite brands in one place. We have a number of these brand stores over a variety of categories in MMall.

Beauty is another segment that will be a key focus area for us. We will continue our journey in this space by providing our customers with engaging and close to real-life shopping experiences such as the skin analyzer launched recently. We are also experimenting with AR/VR technology to provide a virtual try on experience. Further, we will continue to invest in gamification to ensure that Myntra is not just a fashion destination but creates memorable shopping experiences too. Myntra is already one of the first movers in terms of adoption of RNW technology that allow us to develop code just once and deploy on all the channels including Android and iOS apps and mWeb.