Arta's top-tier latency is pushing the collectibles industry forward in an age when shopping cart abandonment hinges on milliseconds of lag time.
Latency issues can cost a business significantly, and parcel shipping APIs and the services that aggregate them are notoriously slow. Through paralleled engineering and machine learning, we’re changing the industry norms to reduce shopping cart abandonment and provide instant quotes where many e-commerce veterans fall short.
Our clients build Arta’s endpoints at critical junctures directly into their checkouts — think of it like inserting an electrical plug into a power outlet—and any lag here can lead to buyer frustration. So, reducing any and all latency was a North Star for Arta's team.
Instant quoting across various shipping modes, price points, and geographies is critical amid our current eCommerce landscape. Below we detail how we provide quotes so quickly and how that benefits our clients.
Innovative Engineering & Parallelization
We keep latency under two seconds by parallelizing our operations. Parallelization saves time by processing workflows simultaneously rather than one after another.
The Arta API uses asynchronous and parallel workflows to geolocate locations and determine packing, which allows Arta to build quotes in the time it takes to complete the longest portion of the request — rather than the sum of all the steps in sequence — which is about two seconds.
Each instant quote request is capable of returning up to eight separate quotes across various service levels and configurations. Customers can select affordable rates via our Arta Self Ship service tier all the way to specialized handling and white-glove installation with Arta Premium.
Our Parcel and Select service tiers are also included in quote options, providing customers a high level of selection. Each quote level has different packing configurations, prices, and optional add-ons.
Rules Engines and Predictive Services
Network requests to external providers are often the most significant source of latency in a well-architected service like Arta’s. Through innovative technology, we’ve bypassed this need to minimize latency.
By leveraging machine learning and our extensive network of carriers, data, and logistics history, Arta has built a small universe of internal rules engines and predictive services to reduce the need for external calls.
These internal engines and services provide blazing fast packing recommendations, currency conversion, insurance calculation, geolocation, air, road, and freight transport pricing, and optional service costs for comprehensive instant quotes.
Continued Optimization
We’re always searching for ways to improve our technology to consistently provide the best in the industry. Since performance in these endpoints is paramount, we continually monitor, measure, and refactor these workflows to deliver significant and incremental gains, even as the overall number of services Arta provides grows. Since launching our API in 2021, our instant rates endpoint has gotten over 50% faster through continued optimization.
Client Feedback
Our quoting speed is a key differentiator in our industry. John Dennehy, Testudo’s co-founder and an Arta client says, “It’s amazing how quickly Arta is able to generate quotes for customers. We offer a very complex array of art— from flat works to sculptures to more conceptual works. Arta’s API is able to take all these works and quickly generate accurate quotes for the customer to get them safely to their house. It looks so simple from a customer’s view, but the complexity behind it is incredible.”
The emphasis on speed with instant quoting continues to guide our development work for these endpoints. Arta is very much a checkout company, and we architect everything with that in mind. Even as Arta has added new services and expanded our global reach, when returning quotes to our client’s buyers, our APIs have still increased in speed.
