Blackpepper delivers instant e-commerce experiences across New Zealand and Australia with Fastly

The challenge

Alain Russell, CEO and founder of Blackpepper, built his digital marketing company around a simple principle: in e-commerce, time is money. For 25 years, Blackpepper has specialized in building e-commerce platforms for multi-channel retailers across New Zealand and Australia. The fast-moving nature of the industry meant Russell needed infrastructure that could move just as quickly. His vision was to create seamless integration across in-store and online channels - where gift cards bought online work instantly in physical stores, and in-store purchases appear immediately on customers' order pages. But achieving that vision required solving three critical problems: bandwidth constraints that slowed media delivery, geographical speed limitations across Australia, New Zealand, and the US, and increasingly sophisticated security threats targeting e-commerce platforms.

The solution

Blackpepper became a Fastly customer in 2012, drawn by the ability to make changes quickly in an industry where delays cost revenue. “When you are processing 5 billion requests for every month, a change in performance of this nature has a massive impact on our customer websites. Some customers could not believe just how fast their pages were now loading.” Russel explained, “In a rapidly moving e-commerce landscape, we needed infrastructure that could keep pace, and Fastly delivers that speed better than anyone else.”
The company's use of Fastly evolved naturally over the years. Blackpepper started by serving images, then adopted Fastly's dynamic image resizing capability, and together with high-speed content delivery resolved Blackpepper’s bandwidth constraints, ensuring quick and seamless media delivery. The team progressed to placing Fastly in front of their application servers, gaining DDoS protection and rate limiting. In 2024, Blackpepper migrated to Fastly's Next-Gen WAF and began activating security products, including Bot Management and its associated Dynamic Challenges, and client-side protection features.

With their recent expansion into the UK market, Blackpepper is able to scale seamlessly using Fastly’s infrastructure, ensuring their high-speed delivery and security solutions were as effective for their new audience as they were in New Zealand and Australia.

Automating security responses to eliminate manual intervention

Before deploying Fastly Bot Management, Blackpepper was playing whack-a-mole with attacks. "You've got pager alerts and things going off at 2 or 3am." said Russell. The attacks came every second or third day, predominantly through the checkout process, creating serious problems for customers trying to complete purchases. After enabling Bot Management, everything changed. "Since deploying bot protection last year, we haven't manually responded to an attack," Russell noted. The system now handles threats automatically, with real-time Slack notifications keeping the team informed. Over nine to 12 months, Blackpepper streamlined their rules, gaining better visibility and taking action to block malicious traffic automatically across their platform. Fastly's Next-Gen WAF, Bot Management, and client-side protection features directly addressed increasingly sophisticated security threats, blocking attacks in real-time and eliminating manual interventions.

Engineering for reliability during high-volume sale events

E-commerce platforms need to handle sudden traffic spikes without breaking. “During major sale events like Black Friday and Vogue Online Shopping Night, Blackpepper regularly experiences traffic that doubles or triples within moments. Fastly ensures scalability during these critical times, helping eliminate downtime and preserve revenue.” said Russell.

Fastly’s shielding and real-time visibility tools also streamlined operations, giving Blackpepper greater control over infrastructure during these peak times. The ability to propagate updates quickly, such as introducing new promotions or inventory changes, has been a game-changer for Blackpepper’s dynamic industry demands. 

Fastly empowers Blackpepper to maintain smooth, uninterrupted shopping experiences for customers, even during peak traffic moments, ensuring both customer satisfaction and business continuity. With security threats constantly targeting e-commerce sites, the ability to maintain uptime while blocking attacks has become essential. Russell's team uses rate limiting, Bot Management, and the security features built into Next-Gen WAF to protect their infrastructure. Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF seamlessly integrated natively across Blackpeppers/ AWS environments like Amazon EC2 and Lambda.  The integration provides superior protection against account takeovers and reduced complexity for teams operating on AWS.

Moving faster with PCI compliance and edge computing

Blackpepper is expanding their use of Fastly's infrastructure in two key areas. First, they're addressing PCI compliance requirements with content security policies. "Upcoming PCI compliance updates require stricter content security policies." Russell said. "Next-Gen WAF now has a feature that allows us to essentially do that. It will hash scripts that are running on sites, tell us if they've changed, block scripts that we're not expecting." The team plans to roll this out in Q4. Second, Blackpepper is testing edge computing for A/B testing using a product called Growthbook, which has a Fastly connector. This will allow them to run multiple tests across different sites, allocating users into test groups and rendering JavaScript tests directly at the edge. "There’s no lag or delay from a customer's perspective," Russell explained. "The HTML coming directly out of edge compute will have the tests automatically included in them."

Key takeaway

For Blackpepper, the measure of success is simple: problems that used to wake the team up at 3 a.m. no longer require human intervention. "If I was gonna describe my experience of Fastly, easy would be the word that I would use," Russell said. Since moving to New Zealand data centers and deploying Fastly's edge infrastructure, Blackpepper has achieved the geographical speed they needed while handling security threats automatically. The company can now focus on their core mission of simplifying e-commerce management across apps, stores, and online channels, providing customers with seamless experiences where updates happen instantly across all platforms. Russell summed up his experience with Fastly Bot Management by saying, "These products have truly simplified our workloads and made our lives so much easier."