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Cloudinary > Case Studies > Stylight Fashions Image-Heavy Retail Search Engine with Cloudinary
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Stylight Fashions Image-Heavy Retail Search Engine with Cloudinary

Technology Category
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • Retail
Applicable Functions
  • Business Operation
  • Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
  • Retail Store Automation
  • Supply Chain Visibility
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Stylight, a fashion and design retail search engine, was facing challenges with managing and manipulating thousands of new images being added to its site each week. With a small development team, the company needed an efficient way to ensure that these images could be viewed quickly and optimally on any device used by consumers in 16 countries. The team considered on-premises options, which would require the company to host and store its own images, but decided to look for cloud solutions instead.
About The Customer
Stylight is the leading aggregation platform for users and the fashion & lifestyle industry worldwide. It helps online shoppers search more than 1,000 online shops featuring the best brands and retailers, compare prices of more than 30 million products and find all the best deals. Once users find the products they want, Stylight redirects them to the retailers’ websites to complete their purchases. The company is headquartered in Munich, Bayern, Germany and has a team size of 51–200 employees.
The Solution
Stylight decided to use Cloudinary, a cloud-based image management solution. The team that enriches the products by tagging them to appear in the appropriate categories is also responsible for uploading the images into Cloudinary. The Product team which is responsible for the client facing parts of Stylight consumes a REST API including the Cloudinary image IDs and applies certain transformations via Cloudinary’s unique URL-based solution to ensure those images appear as intended on the site. One of the most important features of Cloudinary for Stylight relates to automation. Using automatic format selection and automatic quality compression, Stylight’s team is able to easily deliver the best image format, such as WebP for Chrome browsers, and optimal image quality based on viewport, bandwidth and other unique factors. More recently, Stylight began leveraging Cloudinary’s multi-CDN capabilities, which dynamically switches between multiple content delivery networks — Akamai, Fastly and Amazon CloudFront.
Operational Impact
  • Stylight implemented Cloudinary as a key component of its search engine through which consumers in 16 different countries can shop online.
  • Stylight features millions of products on its website, so when a new shop goes online, there could be 50,000 or more new products coming into the system that must be added to and displayed on the Stylight site.
  • Without Cloudinary, the company could not do this efficiently, since they only have five developers who are responsible for scaling all the images and ensuring they display correctly on the site.
Quantitative Benefit
  • Improved the click out conversion rate (COCR) anywhere from .4% to 2.2%, depending on the country.
  • Stylight has seen its revenue per visit grow between .5% and 2.4% in various countries.
  • Lazy loading has sped up page load time by about 100 milliseconds across all locations, enhancing the user experience.

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