Litium Use Case

How Litium enables and accelerates business growth for itself and its ecommerce customers

When Litium decided to add a CDN to its customer package, they compared vendors to determine which best fit their needs as a mid-size ecommerce company. The legacy players in the CDN marketplace weren't a good match: they were cumbersome and time-consuming to manage and service. By contrast, Fastly offered both speed and flexibility in a fully modern platform compatible with a cloud-first strategy—essentially an enterprise-level solution without the typical enterprise-level resource demands, according to Litium COO Daniel Hultgren. "Fastly's CDN is made for modern commerce and modern systems," said Hultgren. "It's been a great addition to our tech stack."

Adding Fastly to the Litium Commerce Cloud for speed, flexibility, and scale

Litium aims to give its customers not just a fast, flexible sales platform but a model for rapid growth. Likewise, the Litium Commerce Cloud is not just a sales platform, but a service aimed at maximizing its customers' success.

"A lot of CDNs can say they scale with your traffic volume. On top of that, Fastly also gives us site acceleration, globalization of services, good security, and other features that let us offer our customers a modern, easy-to-use ecommerce platform while still giving them unlimited opportunities to customize," Hultgren said.

Scaling globally without sacrificing speed

Litium is based in Sweden, but its customers who use the Litium Commerce Cloud connect with their own users around the world, taking advantage of Litium's globalization framework that allows custom configurations for multiple languages, currencies, and brand identities. Fastly has allowed them to maintain their backend in Europe but at the same time allow selling in the US and other parts of the world without any degradation in response time. Litium customers report that global response times have improved since putting Fastly in the mix.

Unlocking potential with unlimited customization—or a great platform on day one

One of the main values Litium gives its customers is an ecommerce solution ready to use out of the box but also ready to customize however they like. Hultgren likens it to a house made of LEGO bricks: "We don't just give you a pile of bricks, we give you a fully built structure. But from there, you can modify it and build whatever you want on top of Litium." Customers can use Litium without any modification and use Litium's best practices, or they can create unique customer experiences, go headless or implement any kind of customization they need with the 100% flexible storefront.

This flexibility is enhanced by features such as Fastly's VCL, which allows users to create specialized configurations, distribute them to Fastly caches, and activate them without any downtime. Letting customers know that Fastly helps drive the Litium Commerce Cloud platform makes a big difference too. "Sales-wise," Hultgren said, "it helps to tell customers that we are working with a good partner. We're proud to say we sell Litium with a CDN powered by Fastly."

Automating image transformation

Litium includes Fastly's Image Optimizer as part of its platform, which allows its customers to offload image transformation to Fastly's edge cloud network. Fastly's Image Optimizer resizes images, adjusts quality as needed, converts file formats and more, on demand. This reduces traffic to the origin server, cuts possible storage costs, and also offloads resource-consuming image transformation applications from Litium's network.

Litium's customers can implement and customize Image Optimization with any code changes—with Fastly's API it integrates seamlessly. Especially in ecommerce, transforming and serving images quickly is essential to preventing end users from wandering off. With Image Optimization and Fastly's high-density POPs, the Litium Commerce Cloud lets customers serve images faster and decreases page load times even for image-heavy retail sites.

Partnering for long-term success

Hultgren describes Fastly's support team as a partner rather than an occasional service provider. "I appreciate that Fastly wants to be close to their customers and have a relationship," he said. When problems arise, the support response is fast, but the relationship goes beyond solving urgent issues. "Fastly always goes the extra mile for us," he said.

Hultgren credits the match between Litium's values and Fastly's values just as much as the technological fit. "Culture is important," he said. "Just having the right policies and routines is not enough, and only having the right culture is not enough. You need to have a mix of it, and with Fastly we have both the shared values and the right technology."

Looking to a cloud-native future

A significant transformation is underway at Litium, moving from traditional hosting services with virtual machines to a more modern, cloud-native containerization environment. "This is an exciting step for us, and Fastly is a big part of this journey," Hultgren said. Litium plans to incorporate more Fastly features for edge computing, including the Fastly Next-Gen WAF.