How to prepare for increased traffic in the e-commerce sites?

The Christmas time is behind us, increased traffic decreased, your online stores return to normality, servers are no longer squeezed themselves to the limit. From the Black Friday, Cyber Monday until Christmas your GrandNode stores were exposed to the daily increasing traffic. Now when everybody look at their wallet and reduce expenses we can analyze how our stores dealt with this period.

Is your store throughout this period was available for customers? Is your shop was efficient and as fast as usual? Are customers were satisfied with the proces of shopping and browsing the store?

If any of these questions had negative answer is a sign that the next time heavy traffic you need to improve a few things.

1.        Hardware – hosting space

Main reason why online stores will break when you have increased traffic is weak hosting. This is one of the things which are not allowed to save funds. Sometimes you don’t have influence on it, if traffic exceeds the capabilities of the server it simply will turn off. That’s why you have to act predictably. If you don’t want or you don’t need to have such a powerful machine throughout the year, make sure that you would have it on laid of increased sales to gain from it as much as possible.

2.        Backups

Usually people are divided into two groups – people who create backups and those who will do them after accident. There are situations where you can’t predict. However, your store may be turned off, you can lose data, so it’s important to have all the tiem current backup of your store and its database.

3.        Test your hosting

Finally, when you found ideal hosting, you installed and configured your GrandNode or nopCommerce you should make some tests. Nothing gives such assurance as effective checking of done work. Use some independent tools such as Loadimpact or Blitz and check how your store will work with unusual high traffic.

4.        Simplify the proces of ordering

In the peak of shopping customers choose to shop online with one basic reason. They want to save their time. Remember one important thing, that even the most beautiful online store for you won’t generate profits if for the customers won’t be usable. Purchasing path must be as easy as possible because time to find and purchase the product must be as short as possible. Not without reason customers choose online stores in this period. In the most cases they don’t want to stand in queues, so you must help them.

5.        Provide the best customer services

In this hot period, many customers will expect help from your side. You must be ready for help them. In many situations people will buy Christmas presents, very often they won’t have knowledge about your products so you must be an expert for them. You must be ready to respond to hundreds of emails, phone calls.

6.        The last but not least – use only trusted e-commerce softwares – GrandNode!

Apart from the server issues the most important thing is the e-commerce software. In many cases, the poor quality of the software will lead to difficulty in the work, difficulty in using the store, in making purchases. As a store owner you have to take care of the store safety, stability, speed and high performance. GrandNode gives you all of this things and many more.