Alkosto

Alkosto is a Colombian retail store that specializes electronics, appliances and household goods. It's online stores are among the top three e-commerce sites in Colombia.

Noted for its “hyper sales”, Alkosto is characterized by competitive prices in its stores and on its website, which often has sales and promotions. Annually, it has two critical CyberMonday sales, which offer special pricing. CyberMondays usually take place the first week of June and the first week of December.

In 2014, the increasing popularity of the online store resulted in an increase in sales and the website’s traffic. However, the traditional infrastructure used by Alkosto could not handle these needs and was affecting the business’ ability to respond to these challenges.
Alkosto’s principal need consisted of reducing itswebsite’s loading time and improving its e-commerce platform in terms of its performance, scalability and stability.

To meet the CyberMondays sales demands, Alkosto needed to reduce the waiting times to upload new versions of e-commerce applications and create greater flexibility and scalability of the hosting services.

The first high-impact measure Aplyca took was the acceleration of Alkosto’s website, which took less than a month. We designed the architecture on the cloud and migrated the portal to Amazon Web Services without interrupting the site’s performance and completed it in time before the December CyberMonday sales.

With greater flexibility and elasticity, we must also have greater control. Because of this, we built a continuous deployment system, which automates the liberation of changes for the applications, adds flexibility to the trial environments and reduces direct access to the machines for routine operations.

Our work didn’t stop with the website’s successful migration and acceleration. We continue to provide monitoring and improvement services, 24x7 maintenance and immediate availability for incidents.