www.heels.com

solutions:

• Dynamic Site Accelerator

DOWNLOAD HEELS.COM CASE STUDY

• Improved site performance up to 400% internationally
• Supported 78% year-over-year traffic growth without infrastructure build out
• Ensures secure, high-performing video chat over HTTP
• Achieved higher SEO rankings
• Increased repeat business

Launched in October 2007, Heels.com sells designer women’s shoes to consumers worldwide exclusively via its Web site. As part of ensuring the utmost in customer satisfaction, Heels.com prides itself on being the first shoe e-tailer to ship internationally and to offer video for every shoe it sells. Growing at a rate of 120% per year, the company generated over $5 million in 2009 revenues, 20% of which came from international sales.

Committed to delivering a unique online experience, the company is quick to deploy the latest technologies and features. To that end, nearly every page on its Ajax-driven, media-rich site is dynamically rendered. While Heels.com customers appreciate the ease of navigation and search, and access to rich product features, the company’s database and Web servers are continually stressed by serving real-time data to as many as 22,000 unique visitors per day. In fact, back-end bottlenecks historically led to poor site performance. Pages took up to 30 seconds to load. In some instances, customers couldn’t access pages at all. When customers called to complain, employee productivity went down while calls were fielded. Plus, Heels.com had to throttle back the amount of promotional emails it sent to its customer base so that its site wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

With Akamai DSA in place, Heels.com has increased site performance across the board, with the biggest improvements internationally. In Australia alone, site performance improved by 400%.

These improvements have translated into tremendous business benefits. Heels.com can now send out hundreds of thousands of emails and be confident that its site will perform optimally for all visitors. Moreover, performance improvements have led to higher SEO rankings both domestically and internationally. "Google bases some of its rankings on site speed. We show seven images and one video for every shoe we offer, and with Akamai DSA, pages display without delay and video is played back instantly. All of this contributes to our higher SEO rankings," says McCoy.

According to McCoy, "Delivering video chat over HTTP was critical for a first-mover advantage. While we knew it would help us provide an outstanding customer experience, we worried about performance. Akamai DSA helps us deliver this unique solution with great success."