Key Impacts
- Increased customer order rates by 100%
- Achieved a five-fold increase in visitor traffic and bandwidth capacity
- Improved page download times for 56K modems by 35%
- Capacity to process 300% more orders per hour during special promotions
- Exceeded previous daily trading revenue records by over 200%
When Marks & Spencer decided to enter the world of online commerce, it faced a daunting challenge: living up to its reputation for high quality, value and service in an entirely new channel. Part of the strategy called for making the online shopping experience as rich and personal as possible, with thousands of high quality images, shopping tools, and other bandwidth-intensive features. What’s more, the retailer needed to ensure availability and high performance through a variety of seasonal and marketing-driven traffic spikes, including a series of online-only 20% discount days that would be promoted via TV, radio and print advertising—as well as online.
Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator places a globally distributed highly scalable platform of more than 25,000 servers in over 900 networks across 69 countries at the disposal of Marksandspencer.com. In addition to optimizing the connectivity between Marks & Spencer's origin infrastructure and Akamai's EdgePlatform, the Akamai solution seamlessly manages all static and dynamic content delivery using servers closest to end users. Site promotions and seasonal demand peaks now pose no threat to site performance—and provisioning for capacity has been eliminated as an operational issue. Optimized performance has also significantly increased browse-to-buy conversions, while reducing the number of abandoned/incomplete transactions.
"In 2005 we would not have been able to achieve what we did without Akamai. It is the cornerstone of our online business."
—Ian Christie, Head of IT Solutions, Marks & Spencer Group
