Through Alvenda’s use of Akamai, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM realized a 41 percent increase in sales per impression and a 10.5 times increase in interaction rates
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. & MINNEAPOLIS – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, and Alvenda, the only ecommerce-enabled advertising network, announced that they delivered the industry’s first online interactive ecommerce-enabled advertising campaign for 1-800-FLOWERS.COM during the recent Mother’s Day holiday. Akamai was chosen to accelerate performance of the Shoplets™ (shop-able advertisements) application, improve response time and reduce application load.
Alvenda enables customers to conveniently shop inside Shoplets, which turns an advertising unit into a checkout-enabled storefront without site visitors being “clicked off” the web site they are browsing. Shoplets operates as a display advertisement until customers interact with it by moving their mouse over it and ultimately clicking to expand it into a fully-functioning shopping space. As a result, Shoplets allows customers to browse products and even make purchases within it without leaving the publisher’s web site.
Alvenda came to Akamai for a reliable and scalable solution to help improve the Shoplets’ load time and handle the high number of sale responses and traffic spikes on Mother’s Day, one of the busiest online shopping days for its customer, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. Having Akamai in place, Alvenda offloaded more than 99 percent of content to the Akamai platform, allowing them to optimize Shoplets performance, accelerate response times and provide a superior online shopping experience for customers. This integration gave 1-800-FLOWERS.COM the ability to deliver interactive shop-able advertisements without fail and drive a significant increase in sales.
Mother’s Day is one of the busiest shopping days for 1-800-FLOWERS.COM and a solution was needed that could scale to support the increased traffic spikes and order volumes demanded by such a campaign. Through Alvenda’s use of Akamai, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM was able to scale up and see measurable benefits to their business. The Alvenda Shoplets delivered 41 percent increase in sales per impression and a 10.5 times increase in interaction rates compared to the banner advertisements.
“We believe the majority of future online sales will happen offsite. Customers will be able to shop with brands wherever they happen to be whether they’re on YouTube, a favorite blogger Web site, or in Facebook,” said Wade Gerten, co-founder and CEO, Alvenda. “With innovative merchants like 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Alvenda is moving commerce forward to these touch points and is generating remarkable sales results.”
“Leveraging Akamai, we not only experienced 100 percent uptime of our platform, we were also able to reduce our application server load by more than 99 percent, while improving Shoplets response times by more than 90 percent,” added Gerten. “With Akamai, we don’t have to worry about Shoplets performance and whether our infrastructure would be able to cope with surges in user demands. We can rely on Akamai to provide our retail clients the best possible environment for consumers who expect an engaging, fast and interactive shopping experience.”
“The trend to deploy dynamic and interactive advertising such as the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s Mother’s Day’s campaign is expected to continue to grow. Akamai is key to providing our e-commerce customers with solutions that deliver fast, rich and engaging web sites,” said Pedro Santos, e-commerce strategist, Akamai. “We believe that by leveraging Akamai’s solutions, our customers can accelerate the delivery and performance of their dynamic content and applications online while optimizing site response times.”
About Alvenda
Alvenda operates an innovative sales network for merchants consisting of premium publishers, bloggers, subject matter experts, and even customers themselves. Alvenda enables merchants to generate profitable revenue by targeting, advertising, and transacting with customers across millions of locations on the Web. Alvenda is a privately-funded company headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. Alvenda was founded in 2008 by three executives with past expertise in merchandise optimization software at Oracle Retail, online retail marketing at Target.com, and interactive advertising at Ogilvy Interactive. For more information on Alvenda, visit www.alvenda.com.
The Akamai Difference
Akamai® provides market-leading managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai’s services have been adopted by the world’s most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai’s global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed online. Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com.
