Natural and DIY cosmetics ingredients

Context and Challenges:

• An e-commerce platform with a three-figure growth rate, specialized in selling natural and DIY cosmetics ingredients, with a very engaged community
• The goal was to do a technical due diligence in phase 1, without any access to the tech team and no insider information about the infrastructure and tech stack

Duration: 1 week

Solutions and Impact:

We focused on two aspects:

- Technical stack: assessing the maturity of the technical stack, to gauge the level of risk undertaken by our client

• By investigating a few different key elements, i.e. the public structure of the routes, the public fingerprints of development libraries and frameworks on which the platform is built, we were able to determine that the platform was outdated. Indeed it was built on an old version of Magento (eCommerce solution), an old version of Wordpress (content and community solution) with outdated plugins, and Javascript libraries that were insecure and no longer maintained. 
• These findings were a good indication that the level of technical debt and the risk of security breaches was high. A complete rebuild of the system was to be planned after acquisition, hence substantially impacting the projected business plan and roadmap the investor had in mind. 

- Website traffic volume: validating incoming traffic volumes with a breakdown on search keywords

• This validated key assumptions about the website’s substantial incoming traffic.
• It validated the engagement of the community.

Within a tight schedule, our client was able to confirm key technical and marketing assumptions and revisit its investment hypothesis.