Prepara

Prepara

B2C E-commerce Website Selling Kitchen Products

http://www.prepara.com

Prepara came to us with a small website showcasing these really nifty kitchen products that they had invented but no way to actually sell them online. Fast forward 4 years and one heck of a roller coaster ride and Prepara had the opportunity to be featured on Oprah's Final Favorite Things episode where they were anticipating about 1-4 million hits on the website by the time all was said and done. At this point the biggest challenges were whether the servers could handle the traffic that they were expecting and should we redesign and redevelop the site in the 2 weeks that we had before air time in order to give it a new look in anticipation of the airing?

The server that the site was currently residing on was in no way, shape or form powerful enough to withstand that amount of traffic in such a short amount of time. As a Rackspace partner for over 10 years we got in touch with Rackspace to brainstorm a solution. What we came up with was a managed cloud and physical server hybrid that was scaleable and powerful enough to withstand any amount of traffic we could through at it. After the show aired they received record breaking numbers of visitors and orders and the site was as fast and as consistent as if they only had one visitor on the site at a time. As for the redesign, that was definitely a "what the heck were you thinking" moment, but Oprah doesn't come around every single day so we decided to do a complete redesign and redevelopment of the site in order to make the site more modern and robust. With little sleep during the days before airing we built out a new shopping cart system that could accommodate all of their products and the potentially life changing number of orders that were going to come in.

The best part of the project was getting to spend the day of the airing hitting "refresh" every 15 seconds and watching the orders pouring in. It was exciting for us and for them! The project went over so flawlessly that Marc D. Ensign of Sound-n-Vision was asked to fly out to San Antonio, Texas to speak at the Rackspace Board of Directors meeting after their earnings announcement to discuss the project and what we felt would be the future of the Rackspace Managed Cloud environment. Since then we have been involved in numerous webinars and press releases with Rackspace.

Below is a sample of some of the keywords A&J Reliable is currently ranking for as of May 10, 2012.