EcommerceGlu.com

Shopping online is now as popular as shopping in-store – whether it’s grocery shopping or a Christmas blow-out, the variety of goods and cheap pricing have made the Internet a powerful force in retail.

The great thing about online shopping is that nothing is out of reach and more often than not, internet prices are lower than the high-street. However, as with any service, there are the occasional hiccups. Problems for online shoppers arise in particular when orders don’t arrive on time. In fact, the issues usually occur at the checkout stage when problems with the website mean that the order is never received in the first place.

Missing out on orders is clearly bad for business. To ensure this doesn’t happen, e-tailers need to speak to their web host before any type of busy period begins.  Busy periods can be Christmas, sales or a positive review in the newspaper. Web hosting is the engine behind a site that drives a fast online experience. E-tailers need to make sure they’ve got this right or they could end up with sites crashing as the rush hits, forcing customers to shop elsewhere.

There are many things e-tailers and their web hosting providers can do to make sure that the customer shopping experience is stress free and the virtual tills keep ringing

The cause behind many web performance problems is a ‘network bottleneck’, which can be due to anything from an overloaded server, to an overloaded network. It can be prevented by making sure the hosting provider is able to scale up or down, depending on the expected site traffic. For example, shopping sites including ASOS reported high traffic figures during snow days – sites will need to be able to handle this seamlessly. This is where the web host comes in.

Most online stores include a lot of images and need to ensure the site’s back-end technology can handle this. Images are heavy files and can cause stress. Using a content delivery network (CDN) to cache images is a good way of managing the load. If the hosting provider can’t provide this, e-tailers may need to look elsewhere as storing a large amount of image files is a vital part of e-commerce hosting.

Another problem is that many online retailers only have one server and don’t use shared load-balanced systems. Load-balancing is the process of distributing activity evenly across a network so that no single server is overwhelmed. Shared load balancing especially important for networks when it’s difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server. Busy websites typically use two or more web servers so that if one starts to get swamped, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity. Therefore the website stays online and its customers enjoy a smooth and fast online shopping experience.

One of the most important aspects of e-tail is speed. A site that takes five minutes to load will soon be abandoned. Speed is especially important at the checkout. If a website hangs at the vital ‘Pay’ moment, the customer may lose patience and confidence in the site and will head off elsewhere. To make sure the shopping cart is fast, e-tailers can use the load testing tools to simulate ten times more users and check their site stands up. This way, they can anticipate problems early and they’ll know whether they’re prepared for the shopper onslaught. In addition, fast websites attract more economical advertising rates from the likes of Google, if you are looking at online advertising costs.

Other online tools available such as www.loadimpact.com, allow the e-tailer, or in fact anyone running a website, to enter the URL and run a free test that assesses the number of visitors the site can handle. These tools can simulate behaviour right down to the shopping cart and anticipate situations like receiving ten times the normal level of traffic.

In summary, e-commerce businesses should look for hosting providers that can offer flexible monthly contracts that allow for seasonal peaks in traffic, accommodating both up-scaling and down-scaling as necessary. Even better, a hosting provider that will alert you should you go over your allowance, ahead of you incurring over usage charges is critical. Your host should carry redundant stock, and offer a minimum one-hour fix with 24/7 staff in the data centre. Ensure your host backs up your data to SAN not tape, otherwise data retrieval could take all day- and time really is money. A responsible hosting provider will have a compensation policy that protects their customer’s business and ensures the host itself has its own incentive to avoid shoddy service delivery in the first place.

If all else fails and despite going through the above to make sure the site is set for success, if it still goes down, the e-tailer will need a hosting company who can get the site back online in a couple of hours. Before signing up with a host, online retailers should insist on a fixed timing for when they can get the site back online, and get it written into the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The key to ensuring a site can handle any rush is to test it, and fix it before traffic hits and the e-tailer starts losing sales and its reputation.