The footwear retailer’s website went live with the solution in November 2008 and the results were almost instantaneous, according to Paul Doeman, head of e-commerce at Office. “We saw an immediate 20 per cent increase in online orders once we went live with Akamai. This suggests that previously customers were, at certain times, leaving our website or were unable to complete a transaction, due to high traffic levels. It also helped us through the Christmas 2008 period, one of our busiest times of the year, with no performance issues or outages and with record transactions and visits to our website.”
Office previously relied upon a UK ISP to host its website and, as a consequence, was limited to a fixed capacity to support it, even during periods of high customer traffic. In August 2008, the website had a major outage due to the volume of visitors responding to a promotional email the company had sent out. “With this major outage we realised our current website hosting and service model was inhibiting our online business and decided to search for an alternative. We also wanted to avoid having to make direct purchases in infrastructure or equipment as we didn’t want to have to develop an expensive in-house cost centre to support this. So we decided to look at content delivery providers and other service-based options,” says Doeman.
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