Customer engagement for e-commerce businesses is essential for revenue and retention but is often more challenging compared to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. To stand out, online retailers attempt to offer the virtual equivalence of a “personal touch” through a variety of website engagement tools, including push notifications.
Based in Indore, India, Feedify serves more than 8,000 customers across the globe, using cloud infrastructure services from Linode to manage approximately 300 million push notification messages per day.
Ankur Phadnis formed the company in 2017. “I began my career working with a giant software company in India and then started a software agency that developed websites for customers across the globe,” shared Ankur. “I discovered that website owners were looking for engagement tools. They had a marketing agency to drive visitors to the site, but then they didn’t have the tools to engage visitors once they arrived.”
Feedify’s customers include online retailers and publishers that use push notifications and website- and mobile-engagement services to reach out to visitors. Using push notifications for thoughtful and deliberate relationship-building, Feedify customers entertain, inform, and remind visitors about their products, services, and special offers, enticing them to become frequent customers and online influencers.
“I launched Feedify to offer companies innovative ways to engage visitors using tools such as surveys, personalized offer campaigns, and feedback mechanisms,” recalled Ankur. “We added push notification services after a year or two, and that has fueled Feedify’s exciting growth. We now foresee expanding what we’ve built in Asia to companies across the globe.”
Like any entrepreneurial venture, Feedify encountered obstacles along the way. “Our biggest challenge has been lacking a server maintenance team,” explained Phadnis. “We get 7 billion hits per month on our server. It’s difficult for startups in India to find and retain teams to manage that volume. I have talked with many other entrepreneurs here who face the same challenge.”
Ankur set out to find public cloud providers that could help.
“We started with DigitalOcean but found the service lacking as our product got more traction and volume. We tried to shift to AWS because they also met our high-memory capacity requirements at the time. We get thousands of clicks per second, and we want to serve all those customer requests without lag.”
With AWS, however, Feedify encountered problems with pricing and support. “Getting the level of support we wanted was going to be extravagantly expensive,” said Phadnis. “We decided to find another partner. On the recommendation of one of our IT engineers, we chose Linode.”
Based on the service and support Feedify now receives, Ankur believes Linode is a wise investment for any business. “I can tell you that Linode’s pricing is great, and their user interface is straightforward to use, but, for an entrepreneur, support is what is most critical. Linode is first-rate in support. If I ever have an issue, I can email Linode and get a quick response, or I can call my dedicated Customer Success Manager directly at any time of day.”
For someone in the customer engagement business, Ankur is passionate about encouraging entrepreneurs in India and elsewhere to engage with Linode. “People need to know there is a choice other than AWS,” he says. “Go with Linode.”
