E-Commerce Platform Performance Improvement

An online electronics retailer with a 15,000 item product catalog was experiencing slow response by customers, particularly during peak activity, such as holiday shopping periods. The retailer needed a consultant to define and manage a process to improve web site performance before the upcoming holiday season.

Approach

A Katahdin Solutions consultant led a team of the client’s architects in a focused effort to identify and address response time. During this high-visibility engagement, the team:

• Captured baseline performance measures by monitoring web response times in various worldwide locations

• Captured a set of possible improvement changes, and prioritized options by time to delivery and potential

• Iteratively implemented changes, evaluated impacts, and determined next steps

• Updated performance measures and tracked progress

• Implemented Akamai content delivery capability as a final improvement item after making targeted application changes.

Our consultant prepared regular metrics and kept client executive management informed of progress as the holiday season approached.

Results

The seven-week effort improved performance 200%, reducing web customer response times by one third. More notably, this improvement was made during the November to December shopping period, where web site hits were ten times the normal volumes.

The improved performance overcame a key hurdle to enabling the retailer’s acquisition by a major hardware manufacturer.