Modular Consignment Experience

An efficient solution to help sellers manage their consignments at Christie's

Client

Christie's

Services Involved

Modernization of Web Apps
Cloud Solutions

Technologies Involved

AWS Lambda
AWS AppSync
AWS S3
Azure CI/CD Pipelines
React.js

Introduction

Need a hand with your collection?

Christie's is one of the world's largest auction houses with a long history of connecting art and collections to buyers connoisseurs worldwide. Christie’s help sellers with getting the best possible offers for their objects of art and buyers in finding the best artwork purchase.

Legacy Technology

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.

Challenges

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.

Product Goal

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.

An elegant way forward

The new solution

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.

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.

How does it work?

Benefits for clients

The "My Account" section of Christie's website now offers a transparent and always available, self-service way to check on the current status of the Consignment, track individual steps in Consignments processing, and review the history of past Consignment that Christie’s helped the client to sell.

By now, business users in Christie’s can make use of a performant application that requires the minimum amount of maintenance and is independent of legacy systems. Therefore it can be utilized in any future version of the "My Account" application.

High availability

A scalable solution is exceptional for its availability, security, and high performance under any load. The solution is highly resilient to data center failures.

Cost-effectiveness

We optimized the operating and maintenance costs by utilizing Amazon Web Services and provided Christie's total control and transparency over the spending.

Modularity

Fully independent of the legacy system, the application can be easily adapted to the client's future needs. Modularity allows for easy upgrades or extensions of the client zone app.

“A big thank you to ACTUM for the strong collaboration in delivering our special seller experience so elegantly and on time. Through ACTUM we had a skilled team who worked together seamlessly to deliver exactly what our stakeholders expected, precisely when they needed it.”

Michele Nauman, Product Owner at Christie's