Challenge
With millions of monthly visitors and strong brand recognition in the pharmaceutical retail sector, Panvel needed to evolve its digital operations to keep pace with e-commerce growth and rising customer expectations.
Key challenges included:
- Modernizing its e-commerce architecture to improve performance and availability;
- Delivering fast and consistent digital experiences to increase conversion and customer retention;
- Automatically scaling during traffic peaks without overloading origin infrastructure.
Solution
After evaluating multiple market alternatives, Panvel adopted the Azion Platform to modernize the delivery and execution of its digital applications through a distributed infrastructure capable of improving performance and availability without disruptive architectural changes.
The implementation followed a progressive approach, enabling the evolution of the e-commerce environment without impacting legacy systems or critical operations.
The modernization included:
- Leveraging Applications resources to extend platform logic and optimize web application delivery without changing the original environment behavior;
- Implementing Cache with advanced policies based on cookies, HTTP headers, device type, and user behavior, reducing origin requests and improving response times;
- Automating media workflows using Image Processor, enabling dynamic optimization of high-resolution images without additional infrastructure management;
- Executing customized logic through Functions, enabling user segmentation, content personalization, and A/B testing directly within the distributed execution layer.
This approach enabled Panvel to:
- Accelerate applications while maintaining SEO compatibility;
- Preserve existing e-commerce functionalities;
- Increase operational resilience without complex structural changes;
- Automatically scale during traffic spikes without manual provisioning.
Throughout the project, Azion specialists worked alongside Panvel’s technical team to develop customized configurations and continuous optimizations, ensuring maximum performance, availability, and operational reliability.
Results and impacts
By modernizing its digital architecture with the Azion Platform, Panvel significantly improved the stability, efficiency, and performance consistency of its e-commerce applications nationwide.
Key outcomes include:
- High availability of digital applications, ensuring uninterrupted operations during peak demand periods;
- Approximately 97.6% reduction in data transfer from origin infrastructure, significantly lowering operational load and cloud-related costs;
- Significant improvements in critical user experience metrics, including First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time to Interactive (TTI), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP);
- Millions of images automatically optimized, resulting in lighter pages and faster load times without loss of visual quality.
By distributing the delivery of both dynamic and static content through advanced caching policies, Panvel reduced dependency on centralized infrastructure while increasing throughput and platform resilience.
Automated image optimization enabled visually rich catalogs and promotional campaigns without compromising page performance — a critical factor for digital journeys in pharmaceutical and convenience retail.
Additionally, the use of Functions enabled personalization strategies and A/B testing directly within the distributed infrastructure, contributing to Panvel’s digital sales growth of 67.6% in the first quarter, compared to the same period in the previous year.
As a result, Panvel established a technology foundation capable of sustaining digital channel growth while delivering fast, reliable, and scalable experiences to millions of consumers.
About Panvel
Founded in 1973, Panvel is a pharmacy chain that pioneered creating its own brand of pharmaceutical products, which started a robust expansion project. Nowadays, Panvel has about 4,000 employees and 400+ stores distributed in four Brazilian states: Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and São Paulo.
