STORES Magazine - September 2008 - (Page 50)

NUTS AND BOLTS / WEB OPTIMIZATION costs as the main dissatisfaction among online shoppers. It also revealed that 75 percent of shoppers who had a poor experience on a website were likely not to return. “Consumer tolerance for page response time has certainly decreased tremendously,” Robertson says, “and their expectations in terms of performance have increased at the same time.” Web caches While surfing the web can allow browsers to visit pages from all over the world, large geographical distances between servers and users can create de- where they are. Akamai increases the speed of the web by utilizing its global platform of thousands of speciallyequipped servers. It detects and avoids Internet problem spots and vulnerabilities to ensure that websites perform optimally, media and software download flawlessly and applications perform reliably. Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator gives customers performance that is up to five times faster than their original web infrastructure, and its EdgePlatform pulls and caches fresh content onto servers that are closer to the end user. The dynamic mapping system directs user requests for application content to the nearest edge server, which then finds the most reliable path back to a company’s data center. “We speed up the path between the end user and the origin infrastructure,” says Pedro Santos, Akamai’s senior product Akamai detects and avoids Internet problem spots and vulnerabilities to ensure that websites perform optimally needed to get to the edge and as close to the customer as possible.” Off-loading traffic Akamai also allows retailers to “offload” traffic that can bog down their existing infrastructure. Since implementing the solution, JC Whitney has offloaded nearly 97 percent of its traffic to Akamai servers. With the main computing power being pushed to Akamai edge servers, fewer resources are required on the back end. This is especially beneficial during holidays and seasonal periods when many retailers experience a surge in business. Instead of having to add new servers to handle the peak periods, Akamai can pick up the slack. JC Whitney implemented Akamai’s solutions just before the 2007 holiday season and was able to get up and running in a few days. It saw page-load times drop even as it rang up recordbreaking holiday sales on site traffic that increased 40 percent. But what really pleased Robertson was the fact that his team no longer had to spend much time on performance-related issues. “Now we’re able to work the functionality queue,” he says. “We were loading literally 3.5 million new make/model/applications. That kind of adjustment from infrastructure into real development tasks is where I can see a huge value for us.” JC Whitney still maintains and controls the hosting of its website and caching rules; the Akamai solution merely takes those pages and pushes them out on servers closer to where the users are. By taking a heavy load off of JC Whitney’s internal servers, it has increased performance throughout the website. And because the site is faster, it also has better indexing rates on Google. “The website is just more scalable for us and that keeps translating into more revenue opportunities,” Robertson StORES says. Craig Guillot is a New Orleans-based writer and photographer. WWW.STORES.ORG lays. The farther away a web browser gets from a data center infrastructure, the more the response times increase. Web caches, which can be deployed by Internet service providers, corporations or intermediaries, store popular documents in order to reduce bandwidth usage, server load and perceived lag times. Because jcwhitney.com uses the Akamai platform, its customers will experience the same response times no matter 50 STORES / SEPTEMBER 2008 marketing manager. “We’re constantly calculating what the fastest path around the Internet is to ensure that if you are requesting that particular site, you are getting that content as quickly as possible.” That means that clients like JC Whitney experience much faster page load times and faster, more reliable contact with their customers; in some of the slowest locations, page load times were reduced by up to 80 percent. “We knew that the site was getting slower and that we could speed it up if we could put some better caching solutions up,” Robertson says. “We http://jcwhitney.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - September 2008

STORES Magazine - September 2008 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Office Depot Unveils First Green Store Dunkin’ Donuts Debuts DDSMART What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Are You a Facebook Fan? RFID Concept2Watch E-commerce Supply Chain Marketing ERP Credit Web Optimization LP Vantage Point Newsbeat Cover Story LP Program Building Biometrics Industry Perspective Customer Service Site Selection E-Commerce LOEB Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

STORES Magazine - September 2008

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