Five Tips for Ramping up Your Ecommerce Store for a Busy Season

Five Tips for Ramping up Your Ecommerce Store for a Busy Season

Five Tips for Ramping up Your Ecommerce Store for a Busy Season Seattle WA

As the holiday season fast approaches, the preparedness of ecommerce store owners will mean the difference in either success or failure of the ecommerce store. All ecommerce store owners gear up for what they hope would be prima online shopping results.

Consumers always have high expectations of their online shopping experience during the peak seasons. They want ecommerce sites to perform better to enhance their shopping. Here are five key elements that ecommerce store owners must address to ensure the best holiday success. These elements revolve around two major factors:

  1. Design and user experience
  2. Infrastructure performance, availability and scalability.

Don’t you want to satisfy and retain your customers? If so, then read on for the best strategies to employ to maintain high traffic on your site.

1. Scale up

Scaling up your ecommerce site improves its performance in high traffic seasons. Ever heard of cloud computing? Using it will effectively absorb any traffic spikes without having to expand your infrastructure.

Another way of scaling up is to have stand-by servers to deploy whenever necessary. Choosing this option requires that you assemble all the resources earlier. Duplicate your content to the new servers and synchronize them for consistency.

2. Test Performance

Any model you choose will require that you test its performance ahead and during the busy holiday season. These models include private cloud, housed data center or a public cloud.

To guarantee user satisfaction, you must understand the capabilities of your infrastructure and adjust accordingly. If you’re using a blend of models, it is important that you observe this strategy. A blended model involves hosting a set of servers in a dedicated environment and others in a virtual environment.

In a shared environment, your provider will not anticipate what resources all companies would consume. Therefore, even if you have a guaranteed disk space, the performance will often fluctuate, hence the need for continuous testing.

3. Separate Application Layer from the Database Layer

For your servers to perform optimally, focus each server on handling a specific function. Your database server should write, read and communicate with the web server, while the web server serves your web pages and content.

4. Ensure your Site is Secure

Before the heavy traffic of the holiday season, ask yourself the following questions.

  1. How secure is your site’s admin and back-end?
  2. Do your administrators use a two-factor authentication?
  3. How well are you prepared for a Distribute Denial of Service (DDoS) attack?

Marc Gaffan, cofounder of a cloud-based security and acceleration service company, Incapsula, adds that it is important to monitor your SSL Certificate validity and expiration date. On their site,  Incapsula, he stresses the need to strengthen your cryptographic security so that you protect your customers’ communication.

Be sure to test and monitor the SSL Certificate’s expiration date for a satisfactory customer experience.

5 Have your Site go Mobile

Ken Barber, vice president of the marketing and ecommerce solution provider mSopper, reveals that mobile shoppers made a quarter of U.S retail site visits in 2013’s Black Friday. If your ecommerce site isn’t mobile friendly, mobile shoppers will definitely abandon it.

It is the holiday season and you want to make it the best ever for your business. Don’t leave your holiday sales to chance. Observe these 5 best practices, and you’ll experience a record banner year. In case you feel overwhelmed, engage your preferred hosting partner to help you optimize your ecommerce site and scale it up to support all the holiday crowds you expect.

Jessica Kane is a professional blogger who has worked in eCommerce for the last five years. She currently writes for Rakuten Super Logistics and recommends them for all your online order fulfillment needs to further your success.

My name is Jonathan and I am a Online Marketing and Web & Mobile Engineer with 6 + years of experience, I offer all types of Web & Mobile solutions including: SEO, SEM, PPC, VM, Web & Mobile Development, Mobile & Web Apps and IT Management.

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