Challenge
According to SEMrush, Panvel’s e-commerce platform receives millions of unique visitors per month, with 57% of hits coming from direct traffic. This shows that Panvel is more than a pharmaceutical retailer that makes its customers’ lives easier; it’s a brand they trust when buying health, beauty and wellness products.
However, Panvel is driven by evolution, which is related to improving digital transformation and user experience, since 45.5%[1] of customers are less likely to make a purchase when they experience a slow-loading website, while 36.8% of them usually don’t return to the website when this happens[2].
To underpin a faster and more reliable service, Panvel needed to improve scalability, performance, and security of its e-commerce application. Thus, implementing modern technology, provided by a vendor who knows the main network challenges in Brazil, was a crucial point in Panvel’s plans.
Solution
Panvel started a partnership with Azion after studying existing solutions on the market, identifying relevant characteristics of Azion’s Edge Platform that meet its needs, such as:
- 40+ edge locations that cover all regions in Brazil;
- a set of edge-native products and professional services designed to speed up and protect web applications at the highest level; and
- 100% of service availability guaranteed by SLA.
To meet its needs and extend its e-commerce platform, Panvel started to redesign its architecture to deliver content from the edge. Azion’s Edge Platform enables a faster implementation that does not affect the availability or performance of legacy applications, leading Panvel to create edge applications without impacting:
- performance in search engine rankings;
- e-commerce platform functionalities;
- web application security; or
- behavior of its website.
For the redesign of a complex system, Panvel utilized Azion’s products to further enhance their Edge Application like Application Acceleration, Image Processor and Edge Cache modules, as well as Edge Functions. These solutions enable, respectively:
- improved response time, scaling to meet peak demand, and increased user retention rates by setting up cache policies to segment its customers and setting advanced rules based on cookies, device type, HTTP headers, and many more characteristics;
- automation of image processing tasks by designing workflows that perform image optimization without having to manage infrastructure;
- reduced infrastructure costs and latency, providing a high throughput through Azion’s highly-distributed global edge network; and
- event-driven serverless applications at the Azion Edge, closer to Panvel’s users.
In addition, Azion’s engineering team supported Panvel at all times to ensure an easier, faster implementation of edge applications, as well as custom-built configurations to help Panvel enjoy maximum speed, availability and reliability.
Results and impacts
Delivering both its dynamic and static content from Azion’s Edge through customized cache rules, Panvel dramatically improved the throughput rate of its e-commerce platform while offloading about 97% of data transfer from the source infrastructure.
With the implementation of advanced request and response rules and optimizing protocols via Application Acceleration, Panvel accelerated its e-commerce applications’ performance based on relevant indicators, such as First Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive and Largest Contentful Paint.
Panvel’s virtual store is filled with high-resolution product photographs and banners announcing daily offers, which can slow down page load times. Using the Image Processor resulted in millions of photos with reduced file sizes with no loss of visual quality and significantly lighter pages.
In addition, Panvel used Edge Functions to enhance its cookie-based targeting strategy and user personalization by performing A / B tests directly from the edge, contributing to evolving its e-commerce platform sales by 67.6% in comparison to Q1 2020[3].
About Panvel
Founded in 1973, Panvel is a pharmacy chain pioneer in creating its own brand of pharmaceutical products, which started a robust expansion project. Nowadays, Panvel has about 4,000 employees and 400+ stores distributed in four regions in Brazil: Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and São Paulo.