eCommerce and Product Data Management

Award Winning

From hard-to-find rarities to the latest blockbusters, Rarewaves.com is one of the largest online retailers of entertainment and consumer products in the world; with an assortment of over 1.5 million different products ranging across CDs & Vinyl, DVDs & Blu-rays, Books, Games, Consumer Electronics, Apparel, Toys and gifts.

Based in London UK and Florida, USA, Rarewaves have been trading since 2005 and has delivered to over 40 million happy customers across the world for nearly two decades. They are proud recipients of the Kings’ Award for International Trade 2023, were named 19th fastest growing tech company in the UK (Sunday Times Tech Track 100 2012) and named as the London Stock Exchange one of the top 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain in 2012. They were included in the Sunday Times Export Track 100 in 2018 & 2019 and the Sunday Times International Track 200 in 2021.

About the Project

In 2014 Rarewaves turned to CWC to build a middleware platform to make integrations with burgeoning new marketplaces quick and easy. With our proven track record in handling large SKU counts and fast moving inventories, we were able to quickly deploy a solution to manage the clients' rapidly growing eBay business, seamlessly integrating with their pre-existing internal system and processes.

Since that initial deployment, our platform has handled growth in inventory size and order count by several orders of magnitude, as well as adding multiple new marketplace types such as OnBuy, FNAC, Walmart, Kaufland.de, and 15 distinct eBay territories worldwide. We have worked closely with high level contacts at companies such as eBay, to help them structure and improve the way their systems handle inventory for high SKU count sellers.

Shortly before the pandemic in late 2019, Rarewaves launched their own website rarewaves.com on the Shopify platform. We worked closely to facilitate integrating this new offering into the companies' IT portfolio, including pushing the envelope of the Shopify APIs to support such a large inventory. The site has been a runaway success, and we are now involved in a constant cycle of improvement and development to get the best out of this unique sales channel.

Data is the new oil

More recently we have worked closely with Rarewaves to build a best-of-breed Product Data management system. Historically reliant on catalogues provided by the marketplaces, this new system is expanding available inventory and growing sales by leveraging disparate product data sources to populate detailed listings, improving the customer experience and search rankings. Taking in automated feeds from providers such as Nielsen BookData and BDS West10, as well as feeds in a multitude of formats directly from suppliers, the software models the data using a system of ports and attributes to ensure the right data is always correctly transformed and available where it's needed.

Our platform is based on industry-standard Microsoft .net and SQL Server, and as part of the Product DB project we've built out a refreshed user interface using the latest Microsoft Blazor technology, providing a tangible improvement in both user experience, and developer productivity.

We're looking forward to working with Rarewaves to expand this new UI out to embrace exciting new opportunities in overseas trade coming through the pipeline in the near future.