SharperImage.com sharpens up for holiday shopping
SharperImage.com, one of the leading e-retail sites, has made a number of changes to its site operations going into the holiday shopping season, Greg Alexander, senior vice president of information technology, tells internetertailer.com . Among the changes: It speeded up content delivery, streamlined checkout and added server capacity. “Especially this year, the Internet is going to be a very popular shopping medium,” Alexander says, “and business who give good response times and customer service as well as good products, are the ones who will succeed.”
On the page download side, The Sharper Image implemented technology from Akamai Technologies Inc. to speed up page downloads. Downloading of the home page had crept above two seconds since The Sharper Image redesigned its web site last year and the company believed that was stretching too long. The Akamai solution allows Sharper Image’s home page to load in less than 2 seconds, Alexander says.
Sharper Image also streamlined its checkout so that registered customers can check out in one click from the shopping cart, rather than in the four to five clicks it took before. The company added two web servers to the three it was already operating. And it made it easier to add accessories to a shopping cart. “We took a look at every aspect of the web site,” Alexander says.
Early next year, Sharper Image plans to implement a system from TrueSpectra to manage the multitude of images needed for web selling. Alexander says he expects that will reduce Sharper Image’s image management costs by two-thirds.
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