Akamai Improves JC Whitney's E-Commerce Performance

By Akamai Technologies Inc.

JC Whitney & Co. is a leading auto parts and accessories store, with the largest online selection of car, truck, Jeep, and motorcycle parts. Traditionally known as a catalog company, 80% of JC Whitney sales now come through the online channel. In fact, the company was named to Internet Retailer's "Best of the Web Top 50 Retailing Sites" for 2007, posting online revenues of $114,800,000 with over 3 million unique monthly visitors.

Since first launching its site in 1997, the company has dramatically evolved its ecommerce capabilities. For example, it delivers dynamic applications and content such as live chat, a recommendation engine, and site personalization. With its Web servers hosted in Chicago, Illinois, JC Whitney was noticing slow page load times in rural and coastal areas of the U.S. at all times, as well as sluggish performance during peak evening hours.The company tried using several caching solutions, but none were able to improve performance in all geographically dispersed locations.

JC Whitney needed to meet three key requirements to support its objectives:

• Maximize Holiday 2007 Revenues With Black Friday 2007 rapidly approaching, the retailer needed a solution that was quick and easy to implement.
• Increase Conversion Rates Because ecommerce transactions account for the majority of the company's revenues, JC Whitney needed to deliver high performance to encourage online purchases.
• Reduce Load on Infrastructure Though the JC Whitney site comprises millions of pages, the retailer strives to maintain a lean site infrastructure and IT organization.