Sefamerve

Pursuing Aggressive Growth

Whatever the business, many of today’s companies realize success based on their innovative use of technology. That describes Sefamerve, which has achieved incredible success serving the online modest fashion market for Muslim women.

Founded in 2012, Sefamerve is an online retailer offering the best-selling Islamic clothing. Today the company counts 5 million registered users and 1.5 million customers in more than 100 countries outside of Turkey, including the US, the UK, and Germany. In fact, countries outside of Turkey drive 45% of the company’s sales. In the past year, sales grew by 45%. Sefamerve’s goal is to increase this to at least 70%.

In addition to expanding its social e-commerce capabilities, using advanced technologies like AI, and developing a modern UI, Sefamerve has put in place other elements to help it achieve its aggressive growth goals. These include agile development to publish frequent site updates, regular testing, and continuous performance optimization. With customers around the world, these measures are essential to address localization and the expectations of the modern consumer.

Limited by Basic CDN Capabilities

In line with this forward-thinking technology approach, Sefamerve initially chose a local Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver its e-commerce site in Turkey. Over time, Sefamerve became aware of performance and reliability problems as it saw customer comments on social media. This confirmed the issues the company had detected with its monitoring tools.

Because all site pages were being served directly from Sefamerve’s web servers, it could not effectively handle traffic surges. Exacerbating matters, the CDN provider could only serve static pages. Moreover, product feeds in the form of XML files and bots were resulting in heavy workloads and causing disruptions. In those cases, registered members could not see product photos and styles, and scripts were not working behind the scenes to display content. Combined, the issues reduced online orders, pushing customers to place their orders offline, such as via the phone. As a result, Sefamerve incurred higher costs to process orders.

These performance and scalability challenges also limited Sefamerve’s ability to aggressively pursue growth. “We couldn't run TV campaigns, which slowed our growth. We are a self-funded company, and cannot grow unless we generate enough revenue,” explains Mr. Isa Semih Akcira, CTO for Sefamerve.

Taking Advantage of Dynamic Caching and Cloud-Based DNS

Aware of Akamai’s reputation, Sefamerve evaluated Akamai’s CDN solutions. Whereas the previous CDN only provided static caching, Akamai could serve all portions of Sefamerve’s site, including the dynamic elements. “We were incredibly impressed with this capability. In fact, we hadn’t realized it existed. Since our content is highly dynamic, it was very problematic that our previous CDN couldn’t serve it,” continues Mr. Akcira.

Sefamerve also chose to take advantage of Akamai Fast DNS, cloud-based DNS that delivers better performance, availability and resiliency against DDoS attacks.

Through the Luna Control Center – the web-based portal for Akamai customers – Sefamerve can flexibly and agilely configure rules to best serve its business needs at any time. “We can manage this ourselves, and configure the rules to ensure the same performance experience for each visitor anywhere in the world. Add enterprise-strength security and it’s quite a solution package!” explains Mr. Akcira.

Driving Better Customer Experiences and Business Results

Between 2015 – when Sefamerve deployed the Akamai solutions – and 2018, its site traffic increased by at least 500% globally. Due to Akamai, it was able to scale on demand to handle this traffic. In fact, during this time period, the company offloaded 88% of traffic from its servers, realized an 84% improvement in average page load time performance, and a 114% performance improvement in DNS response time. In the first month after going live with the Akamai solutions, Sefamerve increased orders by 16% and revenue by 14%. In fact, since integrating with the Akamai platform, Sefamerve has driven hundreds of thousands more in revenue per month.

Akamai’s suite of solutions has enabled Sefamerve to better serve its customers and expand business geographically. As Mr. Akcira says, it is valuable to ensure the same service quality around the world. “Serving our site – even the dynamic portions – from servers close to each site visitor, while better protecting against attacks, paves the way for us to grow our business exponentially,” Mr. Akcira concludes.

About Sefamerve

Sefamerve.com sells Islamic modest fashion products for women. Sefamerve is not only an Islamic modest fashion provider, but an Islamic lifestyle provider for our customers. Sefamerve sells products in Turkey and additionally export products in more than 60 different countries. We also work with different shipment companies and different payment methods such as credit card, cash ın delivery and postpay. We send customers product directly to their addresses all around the world since 2012. For more information, visit www.sefamerve.com.