MadeiraMadeira reduces cloud provider costs by 90% and improves site performance by delivering content with Azion

Challenge

MadeiraMadeira is a Brazilian retailtech that achieved unicorn status in 2021 after raising $190 million, led by SoftBank and Dynamo. As the largest online furniture and decor store in LATAM, MadeiraMadeira needs to provide great experiences for millions of monthly visitors to keep evolving and increase revenue.

Slow page load time is a common issue in today’s mobile applications, which are conditioning people to navigate away before they even see the content or products they want^[1]. In addition, 83% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services^[2].

Due to the highly competitive e-commerce landscape, abandoning a website in favor of a more personalized experience is easy for customers. To avoid this, MadeiraMadeira’s architecture team needed modern, edge-native resources to supercharge their web and mobile applications’ performance.

Solution

In 2021, MadeiraMadeira started a partnership with Azion to implement essential future-proof solutions to accelerate its digital growth. Unlike its legacy solution composed of only three points of presence in the country, Azion offers a decentralized, distributed global platform composed of a wide edge network, allowing MadeiraMadeira to deliver content close to users and manage workloads to its source infrastructure, reducing unnecessary costs with cloud providers.

In addition, Azion’s platform includes Edge Application, which is designed to improve web and mobile application performance with edge-native tools, such as:

• Image Processor: enables MadeiraMadeira to keep filling its website with millions of beautiful high-resolution product photographs while dramatically reducing file sizes and load page times;
• Load Balancer: helps MadeiraMadeira’s infrastructure analysts balance the load on their origin infrastructure, improving application reliability and availability; and
• Edge Cache: allows the company to accelerate delivery by caching content at Azion’s Edge Locations, closer to end users, improving the cache strategy.

Moreover, MadeiraMadeira added Tiered Cache, an additional layer of cache between the company’s backend and Azion’s Edge to further reduce the load on MadeiraMadeira’s infrastructure, allowing its SRE team to cache objects for a long period of time with time-to-live (TTL) equal to or greater than 30 days.

Results and impacts

By building edge applications, MadeiraMadeira optimized application speed in comparison to its legacy CDN solution’s performance, providing millions of customers with faster online shopping experiences regardless of device type, location, or time.

Images currently take up 70% of the average bytes loaded per page^[3], so optimizing them is crucial to enhance e-commerce performance. Through Image Processor, MadeiraMadeira boosted page load time by reducing its high-resolution photographs’ file size by 80% on average.

Even with such economy, customers continue to enjoy beautiful product photos that provide the best decor perspective to make their purchasing decision. In addition, Edge Cache enabled MadeiraMadeira’s engineers to offload up to 90% of data transferred, reducing their costs with cloud providers.

In addition, Azion’s Mission Critical Support helped MadeiraMadeira’s team get the most out of the platform, as well as ensure 100% availability for the company’s applications and live events, by providing access to engineers via ticket, phone or Slack channel and enabling customized configurations.

About MadeiraMadeira

For over a decade, MadeiraMadeira has been a leader in offering technological solutions so that as many people as possible can feel at home. Our purpose is singular: to reinvent the way people build their homes. We work every day to ensure that every piece of the home tells a story. To provide this for over three million customers, we embrace challenges and are passionate about consistent results. We dream, believe and achieve: we are the largest platform for home products in Latin America, with more than two million products offered on our website. In addition to e-commerce, we are also a marketplace and work with guide shops throughout Brazil.