High-end B2C and B2B building materials supplier optimizes their worldwide web application from the users perspective

Building something? BuildDirect gives customers from Atlanta to Zimbabwe access to an extensive array of quality building materials in a convenient and easy to use web application. By giving their customers a way to buy directly, they drive prices down – whether those customers are wholesalers, retailers, contractors or homeowners.

Offering customers the best price also means low margins. To stay competitive, they need to optimize every aspect of their business to extract as much value and performance they can. One way they do this is by removing the need for physical stores. While this lack of overhead translates into lower prices for their customers, "it also puts even more importance on the performance of our web application," says Jasmine Kam, Manager of Application Development for BuildDirect. Because of this, Kam continually looks for ways to improve application scalability and performance - increasing customer experience and removing the need for costly server upgrades.

To better understand what their web application performance was as experienced in the customers' browser, BuildDirect implemented Symphoniq's TrueView. After an initial profiling of their site, Kam and Dean Dong, her Systems Engineer rolled the product out by themselves. "It was a very smooth process," said Dong.

In the first few days of using the product, BuildDirect was able to detect and isolate a major performance problem that had caused them a lot of headaches in the past. "We tried to solve it many times, but we could never determine where the problem actually was or reproduce it in-house," Kam said. "Was it the network? The user's browser?"

It turns out that it was a really simple problem, but without TrueView "we would never have been able to find it and fix it so easily." Kam concludes, "We're very glad to have pinpointed this issue with the help of Symphoniq."