E-Commerce Holiday Showdown

Challenge

Preparing for the upcoming 2023 holiday season, a Fortune 100 retailer was aiming to have their product pages outrank Amazon for the top spots on Google Search. With all other optimizations in place, the remaining challenge was improving page load times. Having reached limitations with their primary CDN, the solution needed to augment their existing technology stack with minimal lift or disruption. Due to the retailer's extensive product catalog, over 40% of page lookups resulted in a CDN cache miss. Based on the retailer's estimates, accelerating the remaining 40% of product pages could increase revenue by as much as $100 million over the year. 

This case study examines how this major retailer implemented a Harper cache to secure the winning position for its product pages. 

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Solution

In August 2023, Akamai approached Harper to help accelerate page load times for one of their largest retail customers. The metric to focus on was the average time to LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), which required low-latency delivery of hero image metadata that allowed those images to preload, speeding up LCP. Akamai CDN already delivered these image hints for approximately 58% of product page loads. However, the remaining 42% of page loads were not accelerated due to the limitations of the existing shared CDN infrastructure.

Delivering image hint metadata for the outstanding 42% of page requests required holding tens of millions of keys in a long-tail cache so that even the most infrequently visited pages would perform well when search engine crawlers came upon them.  

Harper was the ideal technology to meet this need, given its built-in application engine, in-memory caching capabilities, and ease of distribution. Ultimately, the retail team utilized Harper as a secondary layer behind Akamai's Ion CDN, which was already delivering a lightning-fast response for most requests. 

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Results

In September 2023, the solution was deployed to eight Akamai Connected Cloud locations across North America. Within days, the Harper cache layer held over 85 million keys in-memory while delivering a P50 lookup time of 0.36 ms (millisecond) and a P95 of 1.3 ms. Most importantly, the retailer saw a 50ms average improvement in time to LCP, representing a notable leap for their already impressive infrastructure.

Further, the retailer saw a 30% decrease in origin requests, with Harper accelerating over 550 million page loads during the holiday season. This helped increase revenue while reducing origin server load even during the busiest time of year. 

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What’s Next

Impressed by the rapid time to value and high performance delivered by Harper, the retailer is already implementing broader use cases of Harper to help streamline their systems, reduce costs, and improve performance.

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Akamai and Harper, Better Together

Harper’s distributed systems platform works seamlessly with Akamai’s Security and CDN products. This integration allows Akamai customers to enjoy managed services for even the most complex requirements. Combining Harper’s unified architecture strategy and Akamai’s value-oriented infrastructure ensures that managed services are cost-efficient, highly performant, and exceptionally resilient. Contact us to learn more about Harpers Commerce Optimization Suite of proven solutions.

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