Online photo specialist Photobox is poised to complete a year-long overhaul of its online platforms as the UK site goes live this month, following the successful migration of operations in France and Germany onto a single platform.

“The migration will be done on demand. Customers returning after D-day will be greeted by a pop-up box, saying: ‘Please wait while we migrate you’. A video will explain what’s happening,” said Photoways Group UK managing director and company founder Mark Chapman. “There will be a trickle migration of people who haven’t logged in recently.”

Photobox merged with French company Photoways in April 2006 to become Photoways Group. Its aim was to integrate the operations across 15 countries – the main ones being the UK, France and Germany – two factories, four data centres, as well as integrating five e-commerce platforms onto a single one.

Meanwhile, Photoways has grown into one of Europe’s largest pure-play e-tailers, with more than 5 million members and a non-photo calendar business that is now as big as photos. Photobox hosts more than 1,000 terabytes of data across the company.

“It’s been a massive undertaking, but when 100 per cent of the business is on one platform, the cost of ownership is much less because it’s much easier to manage,” explained Chapman.

Platform and applications development has been bespoke using Softserve in Ukraine. Storage is provided by Isilon Systems.

The cost of the project has not been disclosed, but Chapman revealed that it is “a multimillion-euro investment – serious telephone numbers”. It has been financed with the help of the company’s venture capitalist backers, which also introduced Softserve to the company.

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