Challenge
As a leading fashion and lifestyle ecosystem in Brazil, Lojas Renner aims to deliver the best online experience through its e-commerce platform, which includes other successful brands such as Youcom and Camicado, as well as operations in Argentina and Uruguay.
Maintaining the performance of this expansive digital infrastructure is a challenge. It requires implementing cutting-edge technologies that boost efficiency and align with modern shopping trends. At Renner, this translates into initiatives to provide a responsive, stable website and craft personalized shopping experiences throughout the customer journey, considering that:
- SEO metrics influence ranking in search results;
- The website’s performance is crucial for keeping users on the page;
- 69% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when they have a personalized experience[1].
These points align with two of Renner’s major goals: to exceed the expectations for millions of unique visitors each month and to handle large traffic spikes, especially on commercial days like Black Friday, which engages eight out of every ten consumers[2] and introduces hundreds of thousands of people to online shopping.
To provide a better shopping experience, Renner has advanced its cloud-based IT framework. It’s known that models centralizing content delivery can negatively affect website performance. Due to this, customers in regions with less reliable IT infrastructures may not fully benefit from the shopping experience Renner offers.
Solution
Renner migrated its web applications to Azion’s Edge Computing Platform in order to speed up content delivery, compared to what cloud infrastructure could achieve, and to make applications more resilient, ready to perform at high efficiency even in the most complex scenarios.
As a result, the company now has a stack of solutions, including Edge Applications and Edge Functions, which enabled their DevOps team to:
- Carry out A/B tests using edge-built functions;
- Provide a personalized shopping experience for each user;
- Use visual computing algorithms to automatically optimize images.
In addition, besides promoting innovation and enabling strategies to boost sales, another objective behind these implementations was to also reap benefits in terms of cost-effective infrastructure solutions by reducing the use of cloud computing.
Results
By migrating to Azion, Renner’s e-commerce platform gained in scalability and resilience, managing to handle a peak of 899,000 requests per second, with only a small percentage of them accessing its origin infrastructure.
Renner now efficiently handles millions of daily requests associated with processing high-resolution photos for their website without compromising their visual features and quality. As a result, the company has managed to:
- Reduce the loading time for online applications;
- Enable access for customers with limited broadband resources, especially mobile users;
- Improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) performance;
- Cut down on online advertising costs, thereby increasing organic traffic;
- Boost sales conversions by offering a seamless experience.
In six months, Renner reached a peak of 18,000 requests per second on Azion’s Image Processor and saved 67% in data transfer, resulting in efficiency and maximization of ROI (return on investment).
About Lojas Renner
Founded in 1965, Lojas Renner S.A. was the first Brazilian corporation with 100% of its shares traded on the stock exchange, and is listed on the Novo Mercado, the highest level among the corporate governance levels of B3. Its fashion and lifestyle ecosystem is formed by the brands: Renner, which features clothing and accessories in various styles; Camicado, a home and decor company; Youcom, specializing in youth fashion; and ASHUA Curve & Plus Size. Currently, there are over 600 stores in operation. Considering all businesses, the company also operates with Realize CFI, which supports retail activity through the offering and management of financial products. In addition to being present in Brazil with all its brands, Lojas Renner S.A. began its process of internationalization by opening Renner units in Uruguay, starting from 2017, and in Argentina in 2019.