Adobe Success Story

· Speed of Development—Accomplished a phenomenal amount of work in short period of time.
· Performance—Site load tested to support up to 1,000 concurrent users per server.
· Ease to Learn— "We can have a new developer writing productive code in 2-3 weeks."

Project Details

With thousands of SKUs from hundreds of brands—including Samsonite, The North Face, JanSport, and Liz Claiborne—eBags is the online boutique for luggage, wallets, knapsacks, duffels and sports bags, business cases, handbags, and other travel-related gear. Founded in mid-1998 by luggage-industry executives and launched in early 1999, eBags today serves more than one million page views a day to tens of thousands of unique visitors, making it a consistent top-100 Web site.

Partnerships with leading portals such as MSN, America Online, Yahoo!, Lycos, and iWon and a unique luggage site co-branded with United Airlines have fueled eBags' meteoric growth. Growing at 9% a week since the site's launch, eBags is the world's largest supplier of luggage and travel-related accessories, using a near-zero inventory business model that leverages on drop-shipment fulfillment from manufacturers.

"There's no question about it, we're a high-growth company operating a very dynamic site," said Val Agostino, Web applications manager for eBags. "Not only are we always changing our product mix, we're also changing the site weekly to reflect our constantly evolving business requirements. For example, we've created four parallel sites for our business: eBags Gallery, eBags Outlet, eBags, and an eBags Corporate site for bulk orders and logo-branded merchandise."

For a dot-com company that's changing its core business site every few days, it's essential to have a Web platform that can stay in step, Agostino noted. Needing to get to market quickly was also a non-negotiable requirement, which made the selection of its development platform a strategic choice.

"When we first founded the company, we looked at several alternatives, including Active Server Pages, Java, and Perl," he said. "Ultimately, we needed a solution with a faster development time than those choices."

Seeking the speed and flexibility that would enable it to pursue its business mission, eBags selected Macromedia for its e-business platform. With products that are consistently rated by customers and analysts among the most productive, versatile, and accessible in the industry, Macromedia enables both high profile and up-and-coming companies to create innovative Internet business solutions. Macromedia's family of application servers and visual tools, combined with its application framework, form a complete software infrastructure for building online businesses.

eBags' implementation features ColdFusion, Macromedia's application server for building and deploying scalable Web applications that integrate browser, server, and database. Open integration with databases, e-mail, directories, XML, and enterprise systems enables Web developers to build sophisticated applications quickly and easily. ColdFusion also provides security on every level, from Web development through deployment.

Intuitive Platform Drives Rapid Development

According to Agostino, ColdFusion has been instrumental to the success of eBags. "We've accomplished a phenomenal amount of work with ColdFusion," he said. "Initially, we had an outside contractor building the site while we staffed up internally. Our three in-house developers took over and completed the last half of it in less than two months.

"ColdFusion has the raw power and inherent features we need to create and maintain our site. The rapid development time and fast learning curve mean we can bring on a new developer and have them writing productive code in two or three weeks. Since we launched the site in March 1999, we've entirely rebuilt the site four times to respond to our evolving needs."

Agostino also attributes some of that rapid development to the community-supported "FuseBox" architecture for standardized coding (www.fusebox.org). "ColdFusion lends itself to code reuse," he noted. "We believe that FuseBox speeds our development another 25% on top of the gains we've achieved with ColdFusion." Agostino reports that performance has been outstanding. "We put a lot of information into our database and use a lot of caching and stored procedures. We're extremely happy with how the site performs. Our load testing shows we can support as many as 600-1000 concurrent users per server."

A Rich Site—Written 100-Percent in ColdFusion

Using only ColdFusion, Agostino and the team have created a rich Web site that embodies virtually all contemporary best practices for e-commerce. "We're trying to make the shopping experience as simple as possible for our buyers," Agostino affirmed. "That extends to shipping as well. Just in time for the 2000 Christmas season, we implemented a "when will it arrive" feature that lets the customer get a feel for when a product should arrive. Our business model is a drop-ship model—we warehouse only 10-15% of our products—and we have manufacturers all over the country. We've integrated with UPS's tracking system so the customer needs to simply enter a ZIP code and we can give them an estimated date of arrival and set their expectations properly."

Another popular feature is the Ratings and Testimonials section that enables buyers to provide a "review" of their purchased product 30 days after they receive the item. "It's one of our high-traffic areas," said Agostino. "We also ask them to rate it six months later, so our site visitors really get an informed opinion when making their own purchase decisions."

On the back end, eBags integrates a wide range of third-party systems, including J.D. Edwards financial software, site analytics, online chat, and searching. All images are "Akamaized" for performance and Cisco LocalDirector and Macromedia's ClusterCATS provides load balancing across eBags' production server farm.

"We've really completed a large integration effort here," said Agostino. "Our storefront site is 100% ColdFusion, but we've spent much more time and effort coding our integration to these back-office systems for order fulfillment and other behind-the-scenes processes."

Looking to the future, Agostino foresees continued growth for the eBags site. "We're releasing up to 30 new features and enhancements to the site every week," he said. "There's no real finish line — we're just continually evolving. We plan to tie in more personalization and we expect to add more traveler resources — packing tips, travel suggestions, and more. With ColdFusion, we can keep pace with the business."

Site Summary

eBags
6060 Greenwood Plaza Boulevard Greenwood Village, CO 80237

Macromedia Products:
10 ColdFusion Enterprise 4.5.1, 10 ColdFusion Studio 4.5.1

Hardware:
15 Dell Xeon dual-Pentium III servers with 1 GB RAM - load balanced with Cisco LocalDirector and ClusterCATS

Operating System
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 sp4

Database:
Oracle 8i

Size of DB:
Several GB

Development Team:
7 developers

Site traffic:
20-60,000 unique visitors and 1 million+ page views each day

Macromedia Services::
Platinum Support Performance, Analysis, and Tuning consulting

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