Pythian helps FreshDirect reduce customer log-in times from 1 minute to half a second
Offering online grocery shopping and next-day delivery service, FreshDirect has become one of New York’s success stories. The company has more than 6,000 different fresh food and grocery items and in a given day will process between 4,000 and 10,000 orders.
Offering online grocery shopping and next-day delivery service, FreshDirect has become one of New York’s success stories. The company has more than 6,000 different fresh food and grocery items and in a given day will process between 4,000 and 10,000 orders. When clients started experiencing significant log-in delays, FreshDirect turned to Pythian’s Oracle team to address the issue quickly. Pythian’s data management expertise helped FreshDirect reduce customer log-in times from 1 minute to half a second.
FreshDirect users had been experiencing accumulative log-in delays. The more times they ordered, the longer it would take them to log on; sometimes up to 60 seconds longer. For any e-commerce site, performance is critical because it significantly impacts the overall user experience—and can mean the difference between repeat business and lost customers. With FreshDirect’s customer base of more than 250,000+ growing rapidly, they knew they needed to resolve their performance issues quickly.
Since databases are at the core of its business, FreshDirect turned to Pythian, its trusted database infrastructure support partner since 2005. While FreshDirect’s own monitoring tools hadn’t detected the issue, Pythian was able to quickly identify and remedy the problem. In the case of the accumulative log-in delay issue, Pythian advocated for and led a project to rewrite the user authentication process, which included application and database changes as well as database design elements.
The results of the application and database changes resulted in a quantifiable improvement that no customer could miss. Log-in time was reduced to .5 seconds — 120 times faster. Because of Pythian’s openscope, flexible delivery model, FreshDirect is able to take advantage of economies of scale, resulting in a lower cost per database server. Another advantage for FreshDirect is reduced costs through new efficiencies and noticeably improved operational reliability, which enables them to continue to focus on their core business: delivering the freshest and highest quality food products to their customers