SHOPYY

Cloudflare application services allow SHOPYY’s ecommerce customers to operate worldwide in a secure fashion

SHOPYY was founded in Xiamen with the goal of being the premier international ecommerce platform for China’s independent brands. SHOPYY focuses on providing technical solutions for organizations worldwide, including small businesses, small wholesalers, traditional enterprises, platform sellers, and marketing experts.

Challenge: Upgrade from a homegrown platform to a mature cloud offering

At the early stages of SHOPYY’s platform development, cloud services were not readily available to them, resulting in the team building their own system. In 2018, after two years of R&D and internal testing, the in-house SHOPYY platform was officially launched to the market.

As their user base grew, their self-built system was no longer able to handle the influx of traffic, and the management of SSL certificates became more cumbersome. When a large number of user access requests would reach the server at one time, the system often crashed. In addition, SHOPYY found that development not only became complicated, but management costs were becoming too high, and reliability was suffering.

To deal with these overwhelming issues, SHOPYY decided to upgrade its home-grown network to a more sophisticated global cloud network. They needed a partner capable of providing strong support, and they saw Cloudflare as the answer to their problems.

SSL for SaaS provides a reliable full-service certificate hosting

Originally, to deal with their growing SSL certificate issues, SHOPYY adopted a free certificate management tool. However, these free certificates proved to be unreliable, and had a short validity period. In addition, using the tool took a lot of time and manual effort that the SHOPYY team did not have. They needed to hire additional employees just to oversee this process.

For these reasons, they turned to Cloudflare — specifically SSL for SaaS, which automates management of SSL certificates. SHOPYY is now able to fully entrust certificate management to Cloudflare without having to worry about any part of the SSL certificate lifecycle. Cloudflare manages the entire process, from private key creation and protection to domain validation, issuance, renewal and re-issuance. As a result, SHOPYY only needs one employee now to maintain the entire Operations and Maintenance structure, reducing staffing costs by approximately 60%.

Cloudflare’s global network accelerates website access for European and American users

Nearly 80% of SHOPYY’s user base is made up of European and American consumers. Before partnering with Cloudflare, SHOPYY used a local CDN. While this CDN was inexpensive, it also had poor performance and availability, sometimes subjecting customers in the US and Europe to prolonged service interruptions.

SHOPYY decided to migrate to Cloudflare’s global cloud network. From there parsing, connection, and download times significantly improved regardless of user location. Total loading time saw a 72% improvement. For Los Angeles, California —a highly trafficked area — SHOPYY saw page load times reduce from 272ms, to 16ms - an improvement of 94%.

When reflecting on these numbers, Yuanming Chen, SHOPYY’s founder and CTO said, “After implementing Cloudflare, our page load times in Los Angeles, one of our areas with the most customers, decreased by 94%. This improvement lead to an enhanced customer experience and greater customer loyalty.”

Cloudflare security solutions protect SHOPYY from attacks

In addition to certificate management and speed optimization, SHOPYY also began using the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF), advanced DDoS protection, and Rate Limiting. SHOPYY is now more protected from attacks, brute-force login attempts, API and application vulnerabilities.

Cloudflare’s application security products blocked 4.09 million malicious attacks for SHOPYY in its first 30 days after implementation. Chen was very satisfied with the results, adding, “Cloudflare has created a dedicated security defense system for us, significantly making SHOPYY more secure and giving peace of mind to our users.”

Cloudflare has not only upleveled SHOPYY’s reliability and security, but also delivered significant cost savings. “The use of Cloudflare products has cut our staffing costs by 60% in operation and maintenance alone,” said Chen. “Efficiency and cost-effectiveness are values that Cloudflare has brought to us as a customer, and allows us to provide the same great service to our own customers.”