More retailers are turning to content acceleration

Using different types of content acceleration technology is paramount for online retailers to remain competitive, according to some retailers. “The whole block of online retailers has taken a pretty severe beating and to keep up with everyone else you need a toolkit that covers a broad range of things,” says Dennis Sage, director of development at Art.com, which uses both Akamai Technologies and Fireclick Inc. products to speed up web downloads for users. “Having services like Akamai and Fireclick is part of that. It’s where the trend is going and it’s what online retailers need to look at. There is no one thing right now that is a killer application for content delivery. You just have to get information to the customer as quickly as possible. You’re probably going to see more of these technologies if the online retailers are going to remain at all viable.” Akamai has more than 8,000 servers and are part of 473 networks in 55 countries, which allows them to store popular downloaded information as close to a user as possible, instead of taking multiple trips from the web origin to the end user in order to get all the necessary graphics and text to complete the page. Fireclick’s technology uses predictive algorithms to determine which information a web visitor is likely to select and then preloads those subsequent web pages onto the users browser cache, thus improving download time.