Case study: Fashion E-commerce in the Cloud

Poznan, Poland – 11 August 2017 – Cloud Scalability Makes It Perfect for Creating Online Shops with Sudden User Influx and Changing Sales Dynamics throughout the Year.

E-commerce grows dynamically everywhere around the world. According to “E-commerce in Poland 2016” report by Chamber of Digital Economy and Gemius, 48% out of 25.8m Polish internet users shop online – that is over 12 million people.

Bonprix is one of the leading European e-commerce fashion brands, which uses Beyond.pl e24cloud public cloud and e24files object storage to run its 7 online stores. Cooperation with Media4U agency helped develop a scalable and secure technological solution to transfer 2 million images to the cloud, taking care of their SEO positioning.

Continuity of Operations, Intuitive Address Translation

Beyond.pl team created a two cluster based infrastructure for bonprix, considering different content the customers see. Each cluster can be scaled both horizontally and vertically using the admin panel.

Additionally, a keepalived mechanism was implemented. In the event that any of the virtual servers is unavailable, traffic is automatically redirected to another one and server further. Machines take over their IPs, with redundant infrastructure ensuring fluent data transfer. Since the transfer often exceeds 1Gb/s, content provision is shared between specific IP addresses at the DNS level. All virtual machines have also been divided between separate Hypervisors.

How did we ensure automatic SEO image optimisation? – We have a single file structure for several shops from different countries. Each shop uses a different language. We had to come up with a mechanism which would allow for different names of the same image file for each and every online store, making its Google indexing easier, says Tomasz Knaur, Application Development Manager at Media4U. Thanks to the developed application, e.g. a “red dress” phrase is changed to “czerwona sukienka” in Polish. In e-commerce, search engine positioning translates into sales and profit, hence the issue was very important for the project.

From the technical point of view, the solution is based on an automatic address change. When a server receives a request, an image is sent directly from the cache, and if it’s not there, a transparent address change is made, and the message is sent further to an object server. The server then returns the right object, and the string is changed for the appropriate link. The above translation mechanism allows for intuitive link naming and lets the user figure out quickly what the name relates to.

Cost Balancing Thanks to the Cloud

– Thanks to e24cloud, we could not only adjust the computing power we needed in running our day-to-day business, but make sure we are prepared for several times bigger traffic. We’ve also managed to optimise costs by using a ready-made tool, says Tomasz Knaur, Application Development Manager at Media4U.

– On top of that, the environment is scalable and the store is always available, with costs reduced to a minimum, because the customer pays only for the resources they have actually used, says Bartosz Misiaszek, Project Manager e24cloud, pointing out that virtualisation also means reduced number of physical servers needed and lower risk of potential hardware failures.

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Fashion E-commerce in the Cloud