Kitchen Warehouse has reported 150% online sales growth year-on-year, supported by a faster website and increased protection against cyberattacks enabled by emerging Australian technology start-up, Peakhour.
Kitchen Warehouse leveraged content delivery network (CDN) services from the web acceleration and cloud security company, allowing its website to run almost 80% faster by reducing page load times to just three seconds. As a result, user engagement and sales conversions for online orders increased dramatically.
Kitchen Warehouse’s online business now accounts for around 50% of total revenue and every month since Covid-19 has been bigger than Christmas and Black Friday in previous years, according to technology consultant, Luke Matthews.
“We have been seeing unprecedented monthly web traffic with more than six million page views and growth in orders of over 150% year-on-year. Our ecommerce platform would never have been able to withstand the sudden influx of traffic, if it wasn’t for Peakhour’s CDN+ solution,” he said.
Around 10,000 targeted cyberattacks are blocked each day by the CDN+ solution, while blocking competitor bots from scarping proprietary data.
“Peakhour helps us block malicious scraping by bots, which prevents them not only stealing our pricing data but also slowing down our platform in those attempts,” Matthews said.
Peakhour co-founder, Adam Cassar said as the pandemic spread across the world, global internet traffic grew exponentially with almost all businesses shifting online and retail traffic going through the roof.
“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.”
A recent study from Deloitte and Google found that improving website speed by as little as 0.1 seconds sees consumers spend almost 10% more, and user engagement on product pages improves by around 8%.