Postnord digital postcards
Nothing beats a real postcard.
About the project
The entry of digital channels' has greatly reduced our letter and postcard writing in favor of other, faster communication channels. Sure, it is smoother with digital channels, but many of us still appreciate a traditional letter or postcard in the mailbox now and then. The thought of someone making that extra effort to send a special greeting always warms the heart a bit.
Background
As early as the beginning of the 2010s, PostNord saw an opportunity to help those who want to keep on sending postcards to be able to do so in a new way introducing digital channels in the mix. The online-service "Real Postcards" was born, which today helps thousands of people to keep in touch with their loved ones. Through desktop or the app, the user can create a personalized postcard with their own pictures, pay their print and postage with just one click and only a few days later their creation will land in the recipient's mailbox. A smart way to combine digital and print in a winning solution that annually results in millions of postcard greetings.
Solution
Over the years, Star Republic has been responsible for the custom-built e-commerce solution with a primary focus on back end and integrations. From the start, "Real Postcards" has been a feature-intensive solution with periodically higher popularity due to holiday periods, which creates an extra high demand on performance. The solution contains a number of integrations with, for example, the address register hitta.se, printing houses and PostNord's internal systems.
After developing the original architecture for many years, the decision was made to rebuild “Real Postcards” using AWS Lambda, a modern scalable architecture as a foundation, in order to better meet the future and handle the extra high demand for postcards during, for example big holidays. In addition to a better performance, scalable architecture also helps PostNord cut the cost of hardware by only increasing the amount of it during periods of high demand rather than staying on high levels all year round.
The future
Together with Star Republic, PostNord also aims to deliver an even more relevant service for the customers as well as increase the number of orders. 2020 will be an exciting year where the hope is that even more postcards will brighten up their recipients' days.