Shoptop

Cloudflare makes online stores safe and fast for Shoptop’s merchants

Headquartered in Shanghai, Shoptop provides a one-stop solution for online merchants, covering website development, marketing, operations, payment processing, and more. Shoptop has more than 12 years of overseas digital marketing experience, as well as rich experience in SaaS site building, cross-border payments, and other services.

Compared with other cross-border ecommerce service providers, Shoptop not only provides brands with a hosted online store, but it also provides services related to branding and performance marketing. At present, most of Shoptop's merchants are domestic, although the number of overseas consumers is also increasing. Shoptop supports merchants as they scale globally, and they are focused on providing a continuously great user experience.

Challenge: Inconsistent user experience for Shoptop merchants and consumers in different regions

Security and speed are top priorities for Shoptop’s customers — or ‘merchants’ — since they are operating in markets all over the world. However, before working with Cloudflare, Shoptop’s security and performance solutions only worked well in certain regions. For example, Shoptop’s CDN guaranteed fast page load times for merchants in mainland China, but load times for merchants from overseas, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were slow. This problem compounded when Shoptop merchants used VPNs to access their websites, leading to a poor customer experience.

Solution: Cloudflare improves Shoptop’s site speeds while also providing comprehensive protection

Shoptop’s goal is to provide a secure environment for merchants and consumers. Shoptop uses Cloudflare security and performance tools like DDoS protection and the content delivery network (CDN) across multiple domains. Cloudflare DDoS protection successfully mitigates about 10,000 attacks for Shoptop every month, while also ensuring that the performance of legitimate traffic is not affected. Shoptop CTO Sam Huang said, "As the Shoptop brand grows rapidly across the world, Cloudflare intercepts thousands of malicious attacks every month, ensuring that our global merchants and consumers can continue to enjoy secure and reliable services."

While ensuring security, Shoptop also values speed, because page load times can significantly impact user experience and is a major determinant of user retention. To increase the speed and further optimize the experience of users overseas and in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Shoptop chose Cloudflare's CDN and Spectrum products. Cloudflare Spectrum accelerated traffic in real-time and resolve network congestion, while the CDN cached static content closer to users and provide dynamic content through the fastest and most reliable private backbone links.

After just a few months of use, Cloudflare has accelerated Shoptop’s overall site speeds by 50 percent. More specifically, loading speeds in North America, Europe, and Hong Kong have increased the most, by up to 60 percent. This has paired well with Shoptop’s recent growth. Over the past six months, Shoptop’s overseas users have increased by 600 percent, and the total volume of business has increased by nearly 10 times.

Solution: When traffic surges, Cloudflare provides the most cost-effective bandwidth services

Before working with Cloudflare, Shoptop bought bandwidth from local and domestic suppliers with mixed results. Huang said, “Different suppliers charge different prices. The solutions of many suppliers seemed to be relatively cheap at the beginning, but when encountering a large volume of traffic, costs started to become very high. In the long run, Cloudflare's price/performance ratio was the real winner."

The Cloudflare CDN can cache content on the Cloudflare network, reducing the need to obtain content from original sites, thereby reducing bandwidth costs. After using Cloudflare, Shoptop has saved 50% on bandwidth traffic, and total product costs have been reduced by 10% compared with previous solutions.

Solution: Cloudflare support delivers excellent service, allowing Shoptop to provide continuous protection for their merchants

In addition to being satisfied with Cloudflare products, Shoptop also appreciates the support they get from the Cloudflare team, specifically citing their quick responses and quality of service. In the early days of Shoptop using Spectrum, not only would Cloudflare engineers assist Shoptop in completing configurations, but Cloudflare’s support team would also follow up and ask for feedback.

"Working with Cloudflare has been a great experience. They are very professional, and services are spot on," Huang noted. In addition to security and performance tools, Shoptop plans to continue to work with Cloudflare to provide a solid security guarantee for Shoptop merchants as they export their brands overseas.