Peakhour Powers Kitchen Warehouse Through Pandemic To 150 Per Cent YoY Growth
Over a 14-day period, as much as 60% of Kitchen Warehouse’s site traffic was made of competitive bots. Peakhour blocked these bots from scraping proprietary information, such as pricing, while also boosting the site’s performance significantly.
Peakhour’s CDN + enables Kitchen Warehouse’s website to run nearly 80 per cent faster, reducing page load times from eight seconds to three seconds
User engagement and sales conversions for online orders boosted dramatically as a result
Around 10,000 targeted cyber-attacks blocked each day while blocking competitor Bots from scraping proprietary data
Sydney, Australia, Mar. 18, 2021 – Peakhour, the Australian web acceleration and cloud security company, has enabled Australia’s #1 online kitchenware retailer, Kitchen Warehouse, to achieve 150 per cent year-on-year sales growth by boosting the speed of their e-commerce website and protecting it against a myriad of cyberattacks, despite a huge increase in online traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Peakhour is an emerging Australian high-technology start-up based in Sydney. Its services are built around a global content delivery network (CDN) and include website acceleration, cloud security and other functionality designed to boost speed, improve user engagement, increase sales revenue, and lower costs for businesses of any scale. This allows its customers to project the same online presence and deliver the same type of customer experience as the world's largest companies, for a fraction of the cost.
Leveraging Peakhour’s "CDN+" service, Kitchen Warehouse’s website now runs nearly 80 per cent faster and is protected from many thousands of cyberattacks daily. It was able to maintain seamless operations as online business volume more than doubled during the initial lockdown period across Australia, and during subsequent state-based lockdowns.
“Our online business accounts for around 50 per cent of our total revenue, and every month since COVID has been bigger than Christmas and Black Friday in previous years,” said Luke Matthews, Technology Consultant to Kitchen Warehouse. “Suddenly we were seeing unprecedented monthly web traffic with pageviews in excess of six million and orders up over 150 per cent year on year. We have an aging e-commerce platform which never would have been able to withstand the sudden influx of traffic during the pandemic, if it wasn’t for Peakhour’s CDN+ solution.”
Research by Deloitte and Google found that just by improving website speed by as little as 0.1s, retail consumers spent almost 10 per cent more, and user engagement on product pages improved by around eight per cent.
“As the COVID pandemic spread across the globe, everyone was locked down and global internet traffic grew exponentially. Almost all business shifted online, and retail traffic went through the roof,” said Adam Cassar, Peakhour Co-Founder. “Like many other businesses, Kitchen Warehouse had to close their physical stores but by using our service, they were able to not only survive, but thrive during the COVID era.”
The Need for Speed Leads to Greater Benefits
Kitchen Warehouse has 14 physical stores across Australia and a booming online business, yet the company recognised that it faced serious performance and scaling issues with their aging e-commerce platform. The NetSuite platform it uses is hosted in America, and web page load times had been approaching 10 seconds – an unacceptable experience for customers in Australia. It had previously turned to global CDN provider Cloudflare for help, but the results were not what the company was hoping to achieve.
“While we were able to get page load times down to around six seconds, our goals were loftier,” said Matthews.
The company pivoted to Peakhour’s CDN+ and saw immediate performance improvements. Some statistics that illustrate the difference to Kitchen Warehouse include:
Approximately 85 per cent of traffic is being served directly from Peakhour's global cache;
Web page load times dropping from eight seconds to three seconds;
Around 10,000 cyber-attacks each day are being blocked in the cloud; and
More than 1.5 Terabytes of traffic removed from its network, a significant workload reduction and bandwidth saving.
“The results achieved with Peakhour directly reflect the care and attention its team took to understand our IT environment, our technical and business challenges, and our performance goals,” said Matthews.
The y axis marker lines indicate increments of 100k page views. Peakhour began working with Kitchen Warehouse on 19th November 2019, which is right at the first peak approaching 200k views at the left of the graph.
Further Benefits Include Competitive Bot Protection and a Boost in Search Rankings
Online commerce is a fiercely competitive field, and many companies use automated site scraping Bots to gather sensitive product and price data from competitors' websites. This is a huge threat to anyone operating an e-commerce business, as just a few cents difference can sway search results and purchase decisions.
“Peakhour helped us block malicious scraping by Bots, which prevents them not only stealing our pricing data, but also slowing down our platform in those attempts,” said Matthews. Peakhour provides Bot protection as part of its CDN+ service at no additional cost.
Further, recent changes to their search ranking algorithm led Google to reduce advertising costs and boost the search ranking of faster and more secure websites. Kitchen Warehouse has also benefited in these ways by using Peakhour's service.
“We have been amazed and delighted with both the service provided and results delivered by Peakhour and would recommend them to anyone running an online business,” said Matthews.
About Peakhour
Peakhour (www.peakhour.io) leverages the global power of the Cloud to enable any company, of any size, to project the same online presence & deliver the same, world-class performance, security & reliability as the world’s largest companies. Our “CDN+” Service is used by many leading companies to accelerate their websites, deliver optimal customer experience, boost search rankings, lower advertising costs and secure their business online.
About Kitchen Warehouse
Kitchen Warehouse is the largest kitchenware retailer in Australia, with 14 stores and an online business serving over 1.5 million customers. We sell everything you will ever need when it comes to kitchenware and the know-how of how best to use it.