Solving Website Abandonment

By Nicole Giannopoulos
Dolce&Gabbana was established as an Italian luxury fashion brand in 1985 and has grown to over $650 million in revenues. As one of the first Italian fashion brands to offer rich multimedia content online, Dolce&Gabbana operates a website localized for site visitors by nine different languages. The site features live and on-demand streaming of catwalks that can be accessed via mobile devices, including videos and photos of fashion shows and collections.
Every month several million visitors from around the world access the company’s website.

Investigating Abandonment
As Dolce&Gabbana analyzed site metrics, it began noticing that visitors in the U.S., Japan and China abandoned the site at high rates. In an attempt to address the localization issue, the site content was translated by native speakers; however, this measure alone didn’t fix the abandonment issue.

Determining Objectives
Dolce&Gabbana was in need of a solution that would meet two key objectives. The first was to deliver a consistent online experience to improve site performance for global visitors in order to uphold its brand, reduce site abandonment, avoid potential lost sales in the U.S. and Asia, as well as deliver new online applications. The second was to grow site traffic without expanding infrastructure.

Increasing Conversion
Dolce&Gabbana turned to Akamai to analyze the company’s multiple site versions. Akamai determined that the sites’ poor performance, with an average display time of over 8.5 seconds, was the main issue, and recommended accelerating the delivery of the rich, interactive content and applications.  
Once Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator (DSA) went live, the site performance improved nearly six times on average globally. Page loads were five-and-a-half times faster in North America, six times faster in Asia and seven times faster in Australia. Average response time was reduced to less than one-and-a-half seconds.

By decreasing the page load time the retailer also reduced site abandonment, which in turn has increased e-commerce conversion rates. Dolce&Gabbana has now implemented Akamai DSA to accelerate all versions of its site.
In addition to increasing conversion rates, Akamai DSA has reduced the load on Dolce&Gabbana’s data center by offloading more than 87% of the websites’ hits and traffic to the Akamai edge servers. The retailer has also used Akamai Content Targeting to customize content.

A Competitive Advantage
As a forward-thinking company, Dolce&Gabbana will establish itself as the first company in Italy to stream catwalks on the Web and mobile devices, both live and on-demand, using Akamai’s Media Delivery Solution.