How Yottaa and Fastly Were Built to Meet the Moment
In a video interview from Faslty’s Altitude 2020, Yottaa CEO Rich Stendardo explores Yottaa’s role in the major shift to digital in 2020. The interview series, appropriately named “Built to Meet the Moment” speaks to how the teams behind some of the web’s best experiences have prepared for this monumental shift and adapted to the new user needs and behaviors it sparked. Plus, learn how Yottaa and Fastly work together to create fast and seamless shopper experience. You can watch the full video interview here. Below are some of the highlights.
Ready to speed up your site? Get started with a Free eCommerce Site Performance Snapshot Report.
Fastly: When the world went online, seemingly overnight in 2020, how did Yottaa meet that moment?
Rich: Yottaa was well positioned for that disruption. Our culture and our technology foundations for the business were built around meeting inconsistent traffic and the big spikes in traffic that typically come with the holidays, and we just happened to see it come to us in March.
Fastly: What were some of the new customer needs and expectations your team rose to meet?
Rich: Customer expectations changed dramatically for many brands that were really focused for the first time on eCommerce channels. Many brands had good eCommerce teams and technology in place, but they were complementary to a big brick and mortar presence.
What we found from the pandemic was that digital channels became the primary channel, or at least a much more meaningful channel very quickly. But whether you were digitally native to begin with or not, shoppers universally expect a great experience no matter what device they are on. We work very hard with brands to ensure that they provide that experience for their customers and meet their online shopping expectations.
Fastly: How do Yottaa and Fastly work together?
Rich: During COVID, we’ve seen an incredible increase in traffic to online retailers and D2C brands. eCommerce sites across the board have been up 100%, with many of our customers seeing up to 500%. That increase in volume is something that we are purpose-built to handle, and part of the architecture that allows us to do that is Fastly.
For the hundreds of millions of pageviews that we deliver everyday for our brands, shoppers are hitting our infrastructure with Fastly built in, and getting that great performance that they expect, regardless of the giant spikes in traffic volume.
Fastly: How does Fastly’s Edge Cloud help you deliver Yottaa’s business?
Rich: When our customers see performance improvements, and when we put Yottaa and Fastly together, we see anywhere from 20% to 60% increases in performance. That results in great conversion improvements. And for our customers, who are brands like Carter’s and Ralph Lauren, we see conversion increases that are anywhere up to 20%. That means up to a 20% increase in revenue dollars they’re collecting because they’ve made their sites run faster, better, and more securely.
Fastly: What did you build this year that you’re proud of?
Rich: Two pieces of product have come out that I am just enormously impressed with, and that will both have a huge impact on the marketplace, and already are.
One of them is called Service CTRL. It’s a product that governs and controls the 3rd parties that are running on web applications. With Service CTRL, brands are able to do things like protect forums, implement content security policies that prevent data from going places it shouldn’t go, and stop scripts from running that shouldn’t run.
These initiatives are really hard to achieve manually. With Service CTRL, which is built on the same technology as our acceleration products, brands are able to use rules to configure how services are running, and get the dashboards and analytics that they need to know they are running effectively. Service CTRL also creates a great layer of security and level of assurance in the eCommerce experience.
The second product that we’re very excited about is actually Rapid CTRL, but now through the Shopify App Marketplace. We’ve just recently released Rapid CTRL to that marketplace so brands that are running on Shopify can actually make their site anywhere from 20 – 40% faster with one click. It’s enormously powerful for brands that are using that technology platform, and we’re very excited to be able to deliver our technology in such a seamless way with a one-click installation.
Fastly: How did this change the way your team prepared for the holiday shopping season?
Rich: What we’re finding is that the stakes are very high over the holiday season for brands. They expect volume to be high, they expect sales that would have initially gone to brick and mortar stores to now be online. What we expect to find across our customers is that the volume will be up and it’ll be more volatile, but of course with high stakes because they must carry the load of sales that would have gone to those brick & mortar channels.
Our North Star has been to get everything in place to make our customers successful, and operate with an overabundance of capacity, alongside having more and more analytics in place, more dashboards, more visibility, and of course, Fastly gives us great monitoring to know that everything is running well and we’re able to react when we need to make optimizations.
You can watch the full video interview here.