Content Delivery Networks in Cross-border e-Commerce

Cross-border e-commerce has been growing in recent years. Purchasing goods from abroad is getting easier due to global deliveries, well-known payment methods and decreasing language barriers. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a technical solution. Deploying CDN for cross-border e-commerce can improve performance and consumer experience. In this paper, four sets of cross-border online stores, containing together 57 e-commerce stores, are examined. Each set is a group of online stores operating in many European markets with different Domain Name System (DNS) settings. Two sets use Cloudflare CDN and its DNS server. Other two sets use country DNS server settings without CDN. Results show that DNS lookup time significantly decrease for cross-border users when online stores are using a CDN, improving overall website time load. Increase of speed for resolving domain names is on average from 40ms to 5ms. No significant improvement was observed for user in the same country location.