In previous article, we’ve already learned about the marketing strategies for the e-commerce industry during online shopping events like Black Friday, 11.11, or 12.12. However, how exactly can we run the events successfully?
Usually, when there is a seasonal price down and other special events during festivals, a lot of netizens will sit in front of their computer earlier and prepare for access at the same moment. Just like buying a concert ticket, when there are huge amounts of users entering the site at the same time, the server might be overloaded and broke down. In case of this, we should enhance our server capacity. An e-commerce website is different from a regular website, it involved calculations of the promotion rules, such as the membership discount, bundle sale offers, or the free shipment offer, these promotional offers involve calculations, and every company has its own rules. Therefore, whenever a shopper purchases something from the online shop, the system is actually processing a huge amount of data.
Loading speed has a great impact on customers’ satisfaction, a lot of e-commerce service providers offer website server enhancing services for clients. Caching is one of the ways to boost the loading speed, by storing some data in a cache, the data will be calculated earlier when the users visit the site again so that they can access the website faster without excessive loading. There are a lot of caching service providers, such as AWS Cloudfront service or WP Super Cache, that can be used to store a large amount of website data.
However, caching is not enough when it comes to the enormous amount of visitors. The server capacity must be enough for all the customers to finish their browsing and purchasing at the same time. E-commerce service providers like CapraTech are in fact offering helps on enlarging the server capacity for their clients during shopping events. Yet, of course, to optimize the performance, there are a few things that the shop owners should take care of and corporate with the e-commerce vendors.
First, the shop owners should perform a load test for their website. By setting up an online shop, no matter via which platform, reports with useful insights should be able to be generated for the owners’ use, such as Google Analytics report. Shop owners may estimate the average amounts of customers traffic during the normal days and the peak hours by looking at these data. Some valuable data including the active rate and browsing rate of the visitors would be an indicator of how many customers the website can afford at the busiest hours. With the baseline of customers’ traffic amounts, the shop owners will need to set goals for the shopping festivals, such as how many customers they would like to obtain during Black Friday, or what is the acceptable range of the loading speed. Goals like these may help the clients to provide clear, detailed requirements to the e-commerce vendors. The vendors will then run a pressure test for the clients, to see at which point will the website server break down, and see how much space needs to be expanded to the website server.
Yet, the server will not be enhanced instantly in just one second. It takes about a month for the vendors to boost the capacity, adjust setups, and warm up the server. The website server needs to adapt to the upgraded capacity, or else the sudden change may alert the security units and the server might have a chance to be shut down. For instance, when a shop is launching a campaign to attract new customer registrations, it needs to request excessive traffic amount from the cloud server. Since an SMS message will be sent out upon every successful registration, to protect the shop owner from accidental loss, the security unit of the cloud server will shut down the website for the owner automatically when there is an unusual amount of traffic or process. In this case, the customers might be irritated for not being able to participate in the promotional event, which is not good for the shop’s reputation. Therefore, to prevent this, the online shop owners should communicate with the e-commerce service provider carefully and clearly.
If you are planning to launch your business digitally, you may want to pay attention to the above key points. Motherapp provides professional consulting services, if you would like some advice along the way, please feel free to contact us for more information.