Ehlers has sales numbers to back up that claim. When the company launched its e-commerce operations in 1999, for instance, it generated about one and a half times the annual revenue of an average Pacific Sunwear store. That ratio jumped to about 6:1 in 2003 and is now about 14:1.
All in all, Ehlers says Pacific Sunwear's e-commerce site has been a great success. It's been so great, in fact, that the company had to take a number of measures to both bolster and maintain the site's performance.
One of the first steps came in November 2002, when Pacific Sunwear moved its e-commerce infrastructure onto IBM's WebSphere Commerce software running on an IBM iSeries server. The company also moved a significant number of its AS/400 application development staff into the WebSphere environment and the object-oriented world of J2EE programming.
That was fraught with its own set of problems. For one thing, IBM had to correct a previously undiscovered bug in the WebSphere software, while the company's application development team uncovered and fixed several resource-hogging bottlenecks not discovered in preproduction testing.
At the same time, Pacific Sunwear helped speed up its Web site's performance by deploying and mirroring a TrueSpectra image server, which houses the photos and illustrations of the shirts, shorts, and shoes sold on the company's graphics-intensive Web site. An image server not only centralizes and controls access to image stores, but also off-loads graphic content to specialized servers with local caching, thus optimizing delivery of the images to the company's product offerings.
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