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Online retailer tackles Gok Wan's fashion army
Case study: Household goods giant weaves a strong web

By Nick Heath

Published: Tuesday 11 November 2008

Clothing and household goods giant JD Williams has revealed how it weathered the crowds logging on after its products featured on Gok Wan's Channel 4 show How to Look Good Naked.

The army of fans were bested thanks to CA's Wily Introscope, which monitors core processing, image servers and support servers, user response times and more, and provides customised dashboards offering information in a variety of formats.

Using real time feedback from Introscope, JD Williams' tech team were able to track peaks in traffic, scaling back video content and tuning the site to cope with the exceptional demand.

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JD Williams IT director Neil Mcgowen told silicon.com: "After the [Gok Wan] show had been on air we had a lot of viewers logging onto the site.

"Using the system we can look at what image servers are serving simple or complex graphics and see where the load is coming from. If we can monitor this traffic then we can tweak elements such as turning off some video to cope with the peak volume."

"We have been able to enhance the site without requiring massive increase in power. It has allowed us to avoid hardware upgrades and increased our ability to handle more sales," McGowen said.

According to McGowen, JD Williams has taken extra care in how it monitors and run its e-tail environment in order to avoid performance issues with the site.

"We have made our websites a lot richer than they used to be by offering video and dynamic content.

"All of this has upped the resource demands on sites that handle up to three million purchases a year worth £200m, and about 250,000 visitors a day," he added.

McGowen told silicon.com that the Introscope tech has also helped support recent site upgrades, such as letting shoppers enter clothing sizes, as well as front page revamps making the site more closely resemble magazine covers.

By dynamically monitoring and tweaking its sites the upgrades avoided bogging down its 15 servers running across 50 sites and covering more than 20 brands including Viva la Diva and Home Shopping Direct.

In the future the system, installed in September this year, will help support even more resource heavy upgrades that will let shoppers dress avatars in the virtual outfits and view of shoes from 360 degrees.