Footwear retailer Office doubles online sales

Firm boosts sales and reduces IT spending with site acceleration system

Office could not cope with peaks of demand online

The rollout of a web site acceleration system has supported a doubling of online sales at footwear retailer Office.

Since implementing the software supplied by Akamai Technologies in November, the firm has seen fast growth in web transactions, said Paul Doeman, head of e-commerce at Office.

“We saw an immediate 20 per cent increase in online orders once we went live. This suggests that previously customers were, at certain times, leaving our web site or were unable to complete a transaction, due to high traffic levels,” he said.

The internet is forecast to account for at least 10 per cent of the group's total revenue by the end of 2009.

But Office relied on a UK internet service provider for hosting and faced problems related to limited capacity to support its web site during customer traffic peaks.

“We realised our current web site hosting and service model was inhibiting our online business and decided to search for an alternative,” said Doeman.

“We also wanted to avoid having to make direct purchases in infrastructure or equipment as we didn’t want to have to develop an expensive in-house cost centre to support this,” he said.

Following the implementation, Office claims web site performance in the UK and US.significantly improved.

The new platform has also reduced the amount of servers, network infrastructure and bandwidth required to support the web site – 80 per cent of all requests to the site are now routed to the supplier network - and cut costs associated to equipment by 40 per cent.