Lucky Vitamin

What began as a chain of family-owned pharmacies eventually inspired a second-generation health food storefront, where customers could not only source quality organic products, but find valuable information to supplement their nutritional needs. In 2004, LuckyVitamin founder and CEO Sam Wolf migrated the family business online to extend their reach even further.

Fifteen years later, LuckyVitamin has expanded to a global market of 50 countries worldwide, positioning themselves as industry leaders with over 37,000 nationally-labeled and in-house grocery, household, beauty, skincare, baby, and pet products. Convincing customers to make healthier choices was the easy part. Managing a thriving e-commerce platform that services hundreds of thousands of online shoppers was not. When it came time to migrate some of their physical hardware to the cloud, LuckyVitamin reached out to Cloudflare.

The Challenge

LuckyVitamin first ventured into the world of e-commerce in the early 2000s and found limited options to serve their global vision. Boxed in by bare-bones, closed-platform providers, they decided to build out their own on-premises infrastructure to keep up with the growing demand for their products.

Rapid growth was an exciting byproduct of the company’s switch to online retail, but it also came with a host of additional problems. LuckyVitamin quickly realized they needed to make investments in global content delivery network (CDN), one that offered built-in protection against DDoS attacks and allowed them to fine-tune and leverage acceleration technologies to speed up their web properties.

“We had three separate solutions,” said Wolf. “We had an internal security product that was hardware-based; we had some web acceleration technology components and devices— again, hardware-based— through another party; lastly, we were leveraging a competitive CDN and were looking to consolidate these services into a single vendor.”

Hardware solutions had worked well for LuckyVitamin during the early days of the Internet. But with the increasing need to scale their business and improve their customer experience, costly internal infrastructure could no longer match the affordability, scalability, and safeguards that comparable cloud-based solutions offered.

Cloud migration made easy with Cloudflare

With Cloudflare, LuckyVitamin was able to take some of the burden off of their on-prem infrastructure and optimize their performance in the cloud. Cloudflare’s extensive global network brought them closer to their customers and enabled them to improve network latency and site availability. Whether a marathon runner was shopping for natural supplements in Australia or a father was looking for teething biscuits for his daughter in Hungary, LuckyVitamin could guarantee that their customers’ online shopping experiences would be fast and reliable.

LuckyVitamin uses Cloudflare for CDN and additional security services like advanced DDoS attack protection, so they no longer had to fear unexpected outages or unnecessary costs triggered by distributed attacks.

“As we’ve expanded more globally, that [has] opened us up to more security threats, so having strong protection sitting in front of the application has been really useful,” Wolf added.

Cloudflare is a key fixture in Lucky Vitamin’s hybrid cloud strategy, merging legacy on-premises infrastructure with cloud capabilities for added flexibility and protection, LuckyVitamin was able to integrate an expansive network with powerful security and serve their customers faster and better than ever.

LuckyVitamin expedites checkout experience with Argo

LuckyVitamin also deployed Argo Smart Routing to accelerate requests for dynamic content that cannot be cached. Users that need to access their shopping cart was a prime example, where they experienced a performance boost. A compilation of studies from the Baymard Institute found that between 56 and 75% of all online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2018; previous metrics indicated that a combined 67% of those shoppers had done so because of the long checkout process, website errors, and concerns about payment security.

LuckyVitamin couldn’t afford to lose such a valuable percentage of their business. With Argo, they didn’t have to - customers were able to easily complete the checkout process quickly and seamlessly, with no delays or interruption.