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HappyFresh scales with COVID-19 shopping surge, handles jump in ecommerce traffic with App Search on Elastic Cloud

AT A GLANCE

  • 10x
    increase in web traffic
  • 3x
    increase in search traffic
  • 2x
    decrease in search latency

Faster search means higher conversion rates

HappyFresh increased sales, revenue, and improved the customer shopping experience due to App Search on Elastic Cloud's regional storage capabilities that reduced search latency by half.

Lower risk of downtime keeps shoppers buying

HappyFresh has been able to attract and retain customers during peak shopping periods thanks to the scalability and ease of use of App Search on Elastic Cloud.

Better customization of search terms retains and attracts consumers

HappyFresh can instantly highlight product promotions, automatically inform customers when products are available, and take advantage of built-in analytics to optimize search content with the out-of-the-box App Search dashboard.

Attracting and retaining happier customers with Elastic App Search on Elastic Cloud

HappyFresh, the premier grocery shopping and delivery platform in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, was experiencing search latency issues on its online and mobile e-commerce portals. HappyFresh's ability to scale and grow was hampered because shoppers sometimes would leave without checking out — all due to a less-than-optimal search experience.

It was simply taking too long to display search results of products that consumers were searching for and wanting to purchase. Sometimes search results would not render at all.

In response, HappyFresh replaced its legacy ecommerce search with Elastic App Search on Elastic Cloud. And the timing couldn't have been more important as Southeast Asia, like the rest of the world, was in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. HappyFresh's deployment of App Search on Elastic Cloud went live in February, 2020, which meant HappyFresh was ready for the surge of online shoppers.

Moving to App Search on Elastic Cloud allowed us to better serve our customers with faster response times, enhance overall performance, and ensure reliability of our services. Choosing a cloud region close to our customers, and the ease of use of App Search on Elastic Cloud, increased our flexibility and scalability, and enabled our search function to handle the drastic increase in site traffic.

– Fajar Budiprasetyo, CTO, HappyFresh

HappyFresh engineers were already using Elasticsearch and recommended App Search on Elastic Cloud because of its scalability, ease of use, how quickly they could get started, and the ability to easily customize search features for targeted consumer audiences internationally.

Because App Search on Elastic Cloud comes with resource-based pricing and enables the site’s data to be housed in regional cloud servers, it delivers faster consumer-facing search queries. In addition, maintaining data locally provides companies with a means to abide by government and industry data sovereignty rules if required.

HappyFresh promo

Ensuring HappyFresh’s site reliability to reduce risk and enhance consumer trust

HappyFresh decided to implement App Search on Elastic Cloud because it provides a richer search experience than what Elastic competitors were offering at a higher cost. HappyFresh also found that implementation was too complex in the search services they had tried. What's more, unlike with App Search, much of the competition did not allow for the customization of search terms with synonyms or account for misspellings.

App Search on Elastic Cloud also enhances the stability of the HappyFresh site because engineers can easily run the latest versions. They can also make simple adjustments of backend servers during peak shopping periods to keep the site's search up and running — a mission-critical ecommerce element, especially during a global crisis with spiking traffic levels. All the while, because developers don't have to spend too much time optimizing the site with App Search, developers are freed to innovate on new products and services.

App Search on Elastic Cloud enables HappyFresh to scale at unprecedented speed, and it easily handled 10 times more shopping traffic when the Coronavirus pandemic hit.

– Fajar Budiprasetyo, CTO, HappyFresh

The App Search dashboard is so simple to use that non-technical staff can easily manipulate it to take advantage of relevance tuning features. This dashboard enables HappyFresh to instantly highlight product promotions, manage inventory to inform customers that a product is back in stock, and to take advantage of out-of-the-box search analytics to help optimize content. HappyFresh also can easily connect vendors to their platform with App Search to provide for an improved, richer shopping experience.

Increased revenue, higher consumer demand

HappyFresh says its legacy solution would not have been able to handle the ten-fold increase in web traffic brought, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic. With App Search on Elastic Cloud, the HappyFresh customer experience was enhanced with quicker and more relevant searches. This resulted in maximizing profits with higher conversion rates, increased revenue, and higher consumer demand.

Elastic App Search has empowered HappyFresh to maximize profits, and grow revenue at a scale that our legacy search technology would not have been able to handle.

– Fajar Budiprasetyo, CTO, HappyFresh