Fruugo leverages Akamai to support rapid international expansion

Akamai Technologies, Inc., the global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services, has today announced that Fruugo.com, the global online shopping marketplace that simplifies cross-border shopping, is using Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions to provide consistently superior online experiences for all Fruugo customers as it expands its global network.

Fruugo provides an online platform enabling retailers to market their products to consumers across 30 countries. With the ability to instantaneously localise currency and language and provide a selection of the leading country-local payment methods, Fruugo’s mission is to provide great choice coupled with the freedom to shop in a simple, safe and cost-effective way from anywhere in the world.

Glen Richardson, Chief Marketing Officer at Fruugo, explains: “Our plan is to expand from our current 30 countries in to a total of 50 countries in a very short space of time. We have a duty to our customers and retailers to deliver an ‘always local’ feel, with the same level of excellence of service and high speed response, regardless of geographic location, language, currency, taxes and ‘local ways’.

Fruugo and Akamai started testing the Fruugo system earlier this year, to establish a good understanding of the DNS routing and response times, and the best way to manage traffic optimisation. The migration of Fruugo’s website onto the Akamai Platform and implementation of Akamai’s Web Performance solution was finally completed in May.

The Akamai solution is designed to provide rapidly growing brands like Fruugo with performance up to five times faster than their origin web infrastructure and to elegantly optimise the specific requirements of dynamically generated and personalised pages. It speeds and secures highly interactive websites and provides visibility and intelligence on usage, visitors and online activity. Akamai enables retail sites to scale immediately to cope with huge spikes in demand such as those generated by flash sales or seasonal campaigns, bearing in mind different seasonal events in different parts of the world.

For Fruugo, among the numerous major benefits of the Akamai solution was the ability to reach its global end users quickly, allied to the seamless support offered by Akamai’s solution engineers, the ability to self-integrate through Akamai’s customer portal and the extensive insight and reporting available. Since migration was completed, the company has been delighted with the initial response from consumers and retailers using the site.

Alex Keith, UK & Ireland Regional Sales Manager at Akamai added: “Delivering fast website performance without compromising on the richness of the sites’ content is increasingly important to exciting international retailers like Fruugo. Fruugo’s unique selling point is that it can guarantee consistency for its users whether within the UK or all around the world and that requires infrastructure with a powerful global reach and a toolbox of optimisation technologies. The Akamai Web Performance solution is designed specifically to deliver fast, rich experiences to end users wherever in the world they are located.”