C&A is a leading European fashion retailer with more than 1,300 stores in 17 countries throughout Europe. The company welcomes millions of shoppers to its physical stores every day and is committed to creating a memorable shopping experience for each customer.
In recent years, online shopping has made up a growing percentage of C&A’s revenue as the company rapidly expands its online presence to attract and retain customers who prefer to shop from home or on the go.
As C&A mapped out its future, the IT team focused on how to best support a hybrid retail environment that delivers an optimal shopping experience, whether the customer shops in a store, online, or both. Achieving this goal requires always-on availability and exceptional performance of C&A’s online shop. Any disruption in terms of availability or performance might frustrate customers and cause them to click their way to a competitor’s site.
The team also recognized that the infrastructure needed to be nimble to accommodate unpredictable digital crowds driven by Black Friday, irresistible marketing promotions, and social media influencers. During these times, traffic can increase up to 10 times in a very short time period.
“Rapidly scaling for peaks is absolutely essential to maintaining a quality customer experience,” explains Michael Glauche, Cloud Infrastructure Architect. “Independent studies show that conversion rates double for every 100 milliseconds you save in response time. So we set a goal of having sub-100-millisecond response times for all pages in our online shop.”
According to Ulrike Otto, Head of Digital Experience, the ability to meet response time goals directly affects customer satisfaction.
“Our top priority is to pursue customers by creating a frictionless shopping experience—in store and online,” she notes. “For online sales, that means fast-loading personalized content pages and a platform that is always available. We needed a platform that delivers exceptional scalability and flexibility to accommodate peak traffic.”
IT leadership wanted to move beyond traditional thinking about servers and other IT infrastructure. Innovative thinking led to a serverless framework that would run operationally efficient ecommerce applications that are highly agile.
C&A found a strategically aligned partner in Cloudflare. Cloudflare Workers is a serverless application platform for building and deploying JavaScript functions that run on Cloudflare’s global network.
The highly dynamic Cloudflare infrastructure delivers a competitive advantage. It allows C&A to experiment with innovative ways to attract new customers and drive sales without fear of disrupting service.
With Cloudflare Workers, every developer has a digital playground for experimentation. Developers can work directly on the production ecommerce site instead of having to test new designs, applications, and features on a separate staging site first. Updating applications and code snippets in Cloudflare Workers is easy, so developers can iterate quickly without concerns that a small change might unexpectedly disrupt the business.
“We can have multiple instances of the same online shop running in production,” says Urbanek. “You can’t do that easily with a standard on-premise setup or even cloud.”
Workers delivers exceptional performance thanks to Cloudflare’s growing number of data centers, which run code milliseconds away from users—minimizing network delays and ensuring fast performance, no matter where customers are located in the world.
C&A developers use Workers to spin up serverless functions that are integral to the ecommerce experience, dynamically consuming compute and deftly handling traffic spikes. “Backend systems simply deliver data to the customer experience platform, which puts everything together, compiles the pages, and then delivers them to online shoppers,” says Carsten Fuchs, Business Architect at C&A.
Not only does Workers deliver a seamless customer experience, but it also allows C&A to manage fluctuations in site traffic—up to a tenfold increase during peak periods—without breaking the bank. Compared to other serverless platforms, Workers is less expensive.
“Our online demand is unpredictable and we need the most cost-effective way to deal with that,” Glauche notes. “That’s what Cloudflare Workers gives us.”
C&A developers appreciate the inherent scalability of the serverless framework. They can create and expand ecommerce applications without being shackled by constraints on compute or server capacity. Best of all, C&A no longer pays for compute or storage capacity that sits idle except during occasional shopping peaks.