How UK’s Comet maintains double-digit growth without adding to hardware
Comet Group, the London-based consumer electronics retailer, is managing its ongoing rapid growth in online sales of recent years without adding network hardware. Outsourcing content delivery to Akamai Technologies Inc. is costing less than half the price of adding to its own servers, Phillip Smoker, manager of e-commerce information systems, tells InternetRetailer.com.
Sales at Comet’s Comet.co.uk grew 80% last year over 2002, following a significant increase in 2002 sales over ’01, Smoker says. But without the deployment of content delivery systems from Akamai, Comet probably would have experienced server downtimes as it did during the 2001 holiday shopping season, he adds. “When things got busy at Christmas, our servers ground to a halt,” he says.
After the problems of 2001, Comet realized it had to either expand its web servers or introduce an outsourced content delivery system, Smoker says. It chose to implement the EdgeSuite service from Akamai in October 2002, and has not had a problem since in serving up pages to customers in peak periods, he says.
Now when customers call up merchandise pages on Comet.co.uk, the pages get copied to Akamai’s servers, where they’re cached for additional downloads as required by Comet’s visitors later the same day. Although the Akamai system is not intended to support personalized pages, of which Comet offers only few, or e-commerce transaction pages, it frees up such chores for Comet’s own servers. “So my servers can concentrate on the e-commerce transactions,” Smoker says.
Comet also deployed in March of this year Akamai’s EdgeComputing service to further free up its servers from special requests by shoppers. When visitors want to run a comparison of up to four of the 5,000 products offered on Comet.co.uk, their requests are routed to Akamai’s servers, which pull XML data from Comet’s servers and translate it into HTML for shoppers to view. That frees up Comet from having to process the comparisons directly, providing for faster comparisons while letting Comet’s servers process transactions and serve initial merchandise pages to Akamai. “I can maintain the performance required to maintain our growth, without having to invest in more hardware,” Smoker says.
Comet also operates more than 245 stores.
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