How did we reduce tech cost for our e-commerce client by 45%, saving them $160k yearly?
Slower-Growth in e-commerce is the new normal. Facing that, one of our core e-commerce partners asked us to help them optimize the costs of the technology that they are using. At Appunite, we focus on delivering business goals, not just software. So, naturally, we stepped in and did a thorough analysis of where to reduce these costs.
We noted that the highest cost is the Google Cloud Platform. As it includes many services, we broke down even more individually and examined each. It came out that we pay the most for Geocoding API and Places API. After a thorough review, it became clear that our team could greatly contribute to reducing these costs. The savings on these solutions were huge, yielding 45% reduced costs on all customer services.
How exactly did we do it?
Geocoding API
We switched from Google's solution to an available internally maintained service for our client.
As a result, we use the Geocoding API much less than before. It only serves as a fallback when our client's service needs to provide us with what we need.
Result: 93% of expected annual savings in 2023
Places API
We noticed that we were fetching too much data (including photos, information, site ratings, etc.), so we have reduced them to the ones we need (coordinates). In addition, we added query optimization recommended by Google.
We also optimized the Places and Autocomplete services by using the session mechanism and reducing the download of redundant data. We replaced the map from a third-party provider with our own solution.
Result: 89% of expected annual savings in 2023