Challenge
With 7.7 million active customers, Dafiti had a R$3.4 billion revenue in 2020[1]— an increase of 31% compared to 2019—even during a period in which the fashion industry shrunk 20%. Because of this great potential in a highly competitive market, Dafiti dedicated itself to becoming the starting point for digital shoppers looking for clothes and accessories in all styles.
In the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak and the explosion in online shopping generated by its impact, e-commerce sales grew about 45%, and more than 90% of digital customers say they are likely to maintain increased use[2]. In addition, the customer experience helps people in Brazil (89%), Colombia (84%) and Argentina (77%) to decide between buying options[3].
Attentive to these facts, Dafiti understood that improving the speed of its e-commerce—which encompasses four countries in South America—is a key point for providing a better customer experience and increasing revenue. So the company moved forward to optimize its applications with modern technology designed to elevate performance, reliability, and scalability in a distributed, decentralized way.
Solution
Dafiti used a CDN solution provided by a global vendor until September 2020, when it discovered Azion’s Edge Platform, composed of 100+ edge locations around the world and edge-native products focused on increasing the performance, availability, and security of web applications.
First, Azion allowed Dafiti to test and analyze powerful edge features through a proof of concept (POC). During this stage, Dafiti’s team was supported by Azion engineers at all times to:
- obtain results about key performance indicators, such as time to first byte, throughput, and largest contentful paint;
- compare the results between Azion and its legacy solution using technical analysis and foundation; and
- learn the basic functionalities of Azion’s Edge Platform and its impact on Dafiti’s applications.
Incredible results were reached during the POC, leading Dafiti to implement Edge Application’s full set of features in all its domains in Brazil. Dafiti’s implementation included Application Acceleration, Image Processor and Edge Cache—with Tiered Cache added for more efficient cache delivery reflected in better offloads.
In addition, Dafiti added Edge Functions, which enables them to build event-driven functions to run business logic, create user customization, perform A/B tests and serve any number of requests without having to worry about provisioning or managing infrastructure.
Results and Impacts
About 40 edge applications were created by Dafiti in the first two months after moving its domains of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia to Azion’s Edge, providing Dafiti’s e-commerce platform—including its website, mobile app and APIs—with a 86% faster load time compared to their legacy CDN solution, reduced from 18,33s to 2,44s, and achieving even more expressive results through caching optimizations.
By using two Edge Cache layers, more than 550 TB in data transfer were offloaded from Dafiti’s source infrastructure in one month with more than 45% of cost savings on its cloud services. In other words, Dafiti delivers dynamic and static content substantially faster than before while spending almost half of its previous costs!
In order to fill its e-commerce platform with high-resolution product photos that don’t impact page load time, Dafiti processed 17+ million images using Image Processor, saving tens of TB of data transfer per month and reducing all photographs’ file size by 75% on average.
About Dafiti
Founded in 2011, Dafiti is a fashion tech focused on transforming the way people buy clothes and accessories through the web and revolutionizing the fashion ecosystem. No matter your style or whatever you need, or if you are a young urban person or a contemporary mother, Dafiti offers a portfolio composed of 400,000 products provided by 6,000 brands to expand your clothing possibilities. Dafiti Group is also the biggest player in Brazil’s fashion industry and the largest e-commerce platform in Latin America, operating in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia with the support of Rocket Internet group. Since 2014, Dafiti has been part of Global Fashion Group, a leading group of fashion markets present in 24 countries globally.