Avis accelerates time to market on ecommerce initiatives

“Our marketing team wanted ultimate flexibility to drive our ecommerce initiatives with fast time to market. Our IT team wanted full control of the data with little disruption to the existing infrastructure. Elastic Path provided us with a flexible ecommerce platform for rapid customization, easy integration, and internal control.”

- John Peebles, Vice President Online Marketing at Avis

Problem

Avis operates one of the world’s leading car rental brands. Avis wanted to stay competitive within their industry by allowing customers to pay for their vehicle reservations online. They had a complex IT environment and they had to balance the demands of their marketing team (who required rapid customizations) with those of their IT team (who required a smooth integration with existing systems).

Ecommerce Solution

Unlike traditional ecommerce models, the “products” in this case were “reservations”. Avis wanted to use their existing IBM system for inventory and the Elastic Path platform for payment processing, refunds, returns, and exchanges. The Elastic Path solution simply integrated with their current infrastructure, allowing Avis to transfer files from the IBM mainframe over to Elastic Path systems.

The development work required four months of effort from a dedicated Elastic Path team that worked closely with the Avis internal IT team and Avis contractors throughout the project. The complete transparency of Elastic Path’s open source technology ensure both teams were able to trouble shoot effectively and quickly arrive at sound solutions to meet the demands of the complex Avis infrastructure.

Results

The Avis team was very happy with the level of support they received from Elastic Path. With this flexible platform the Avis team could now host their data on their own servers. The flexibility of the Elastic Path ecommerce platform also gave the Avis IT team the foundation to experiment with different ecommerce initiatives in the future.