Akamai Enables JC Whitney to Improve Site Performance and Increase Conversion Rates Leveraging Dynamic Site Accelerator

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, today announced that it has helped JC Whitney, the largest direct marketer of name-brand automotive parts and accessories, to improve its site performance and reduce page load times by nearly 80%. Since implementing Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator solution, JC Whitney has experienced a significant improvement in page performance, which has greatly contributed to an increase in its conversion rates and sales revenues.

JC Whitney provides customers with the widest selection of automotive parts and accessories and offers them the industry’s best customer experience and services. Traditionally known as a catalog company, today over 75% of JC Whitney’s sales are conducted online. It is crucial for the retailer to have an infrastructure that scales in order to meet increasing customer demands. Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator service is designed to help JC Whitney enjoy improved scalability, performance and availability for the highest possible number of visitors without weighing down its web site’s infrastructure. Since implementing the Akamai solution, JC Whitney has offloaded nearly 97% of traffic to the Akamai servers.

“With Akamai, we can spend less money and effort on infrastructure related tasks. It enables us to re-direct our resources to e-Commerce development activities that improve our online shopping experience and increase our sales,” said Geoffrey Robertson, Vice President, e-Commerce and Technology. “Leveraging Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator solution, we have experienced a significant improvement in page performance and have seen a 9 - 10% increase in our conversion rates due to the improved shopping experience and reduced load on web and application servers.”

Prior to using Akamai, performance reports showed that JC Whitney’s web site page load times were slowing down in some geographic areas. Some sites also showed slow down issues during their peak selling periods in the evening. After going live with Akamai, according to Gomez, a leader in web application experience management, JC Whitney’s web site recorded a 50% decrease in load times averaged across the country. In some U.S. cities, the page load times were reduced by up to 80%, from 14 seconds to 3 seconds.

“We signed up with Akamai a week prior to Black Friday 2007, the Friday after Thanksgiving day, and within five days, our site was up and running,” said Tom Kottwitz, Director, IT, JC Whitney. “Akamai enabled us to get our site ready within days so we were able to handle the traffic spikes during one of our busiest shopping seasons. During the holiday season, we experienced a 40% increase in our site traffic and generated record-breaking online holiday sales.”

“With the increasing number of consumers interacting and shopping online nowadays, they have less patience to wait for a site to load when searching for a specific product,” said Brad Rinklin, vice president of marketing, Akamai. “Online retailers such as JC Whitney are striving to provide the best possible shopping experience and environment for their consumers. Leveraging Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator service, retailers can deliver an enhanced, reliable user experience with the goal of building brand loyalty.”

Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator solution is designed to help accelerate the delivery of dynamic, rich interactive content and meet today’s consumer expectations for a fast-loading, always available site, regardless of the number of images, amount of dynamically generated content or Internet conditions. The Dynamic Site Accelerator solution is built on Akamai’s globally distributed platform the most pervasive platform for content delivery and Web site acceleration, comprising more than 34,000 servers in 70 countries within nearly 1,000 networks. Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator solution gives performance that is up to five times faster than on original web infrastructure.