Gourmet Gift Baskets crafts an exceptional consumer experience with Fastly

The challenge

Gourmet Gift Baskets (GGB) was already a $20M e-commerce company when COVID-19 shut down celebratory events, leaving consumers to find alternate ways to show they care. Sales doubled nearly overnight in 2020 and have held steady ever since. GGB makes it effortless to buy and send high-quality handmade gifts. The company’s investment in a strong e-commerce technology stack enables GGB to present a fresh, personalized, image-rich website that delivers exceptional experiences from product selection to checkout. 

Brand awareness and reputation are crucial in the gourmet gift basket business, as consumers have occasion-driven needs for gift giving. Images and videos help consumers understand what they're purchasing for their giftee, and a fast website conveys the sense that the gift will be delivered quickly. The products need to be well-communicated, and the product selection process needs to be efficient. The checkout process naturally involves extra steps—information about both the consumer and the giftee—so it needs to be fast and frictionless.

Bursty seasonal demand and high volumes of quick responses to successful marketing campaigns overwhelmed the company’s servers. GGB didn’t use a CDN at the time, because the previous CDN performed so poorly, delivering the wrong personalized content and lacked image optimization features. Since GGB’s entire business is dependent upon website performance, company leaders entered with trepidation into a search for a CDN provider—until they saw that Fastly could really help GGB strengthen its technology stack and grow its business.

The solution

Fastly delivered on its promise that each consumer would get the right personalized experience at the fastest speed. Fastly Delivery, Image Optimizer, and a brief engagement with Fastly Professional Services enabled GGB to deliver a high-quality consumer experience. 

Personalized banners create unique experiences

When consumers arrive from an affiliate network after clicking a digital ad, GGB reinforces the affiliate relationship by naming the affiliate and using the ad content in top-of-page banners. URL parameters drive the personalized messaging. “We set up rules in Fastly to make sure that certain parts of the pages are cached while other parts remain dynamic,” Bergeron says. “The URL parameters are captured in a way that creates a fresh instance for every user. Images load on the back end.”

The website runs fast, even under heavy loads

Despite the concentrated burst of traffic driven to the site from SMS text campaigns, the GGB website keeps up. “A lot of users open the link right away when they receive a text message, as compared to an email, so text campaigns cause a lot of server load. The load is magnified when the URL parameters are different for each recipient to enable a personalized experience,” Bergeron says. “With Fastly, we can cache SMS-specific HTML landing pages. Then, after the initial page load, a second load fills in the dynamic information based on the parameters. We can send messages to a hundred thousand people at once without a hiccup when they click through. Every consumer has a great experience,” he says. 

Purging the cache for one page at a time maintains performance

GGB changes gift-basket products and images seasonally, which could impact page load times. The company’s developers also like to check their own work, so they need to purge the cache to see the new content. “Fastly’s support team created purging keys for us, so for example, we could purge images or HTML content for a single page instead of purging all the cached images across the site. Later, we added a rule in the BV Commerce e-commerce platform to purge a singular URL's components through Fastly. Now, we just update and save a page from within our e-commerce platform, and the purge request happens on Fastly,” Bergeron says. 

Optimal website speed delivers higher Core Web Vitals 

The speedy Fastly solution also boosts GGB’s Core Web Vitals metrics that Google uses to rank websites, such as largest contentful paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), Speed Index (SI), and Time to Interactive (TTI). Fastly loads images faster than the company’s own servers, and images are both optimized and served from multiple locations for better results.

Fastly support provides critical service during the holiday seasons

“With an occasion-based business, our traffic can triple during the holiday season: Thanksgiving and Black Friday through December. Fastly helps us ensure we’re always ready for the next holiday season.”

Bergeron says the Fastly support team has been of immense help. “Austin worked through ideas with us and then, when we made changes, he’d watch what happened and follow up. When we had another issue with a bigger scope, we engaged Fastly Professional Services—and they were great too,” Bergeron says. 

Key takeaway 

As Gourmet Gift Baskets website delivers delightful consumer experiences every day of the year, Bergeron recognizes and values the can-do approach taken by Fastly. “Fastly told us, ‘We can make this happen the way you want. It'll take some work, but we'll take the time to understand what you need to make sure that each consumer gets the right experience at the fastest capability.” And Fastly did.