Avoid an eBuyer Mega Monday: Scale, Scale, Scale!
How can ecommerce businesses avoid distrastrous outages like eBuyer on Mega Monday? Steve Drew, Service Delivery Manager at Open Plus, argues that scalable servers in the Cloud are the answer
Posted by Steve Drew, 2nd December 2011
'Mega Monday' always promised increased traffic volumes to ecommerce sites like eBuyer this year. And being the 110th busiest site registered in the UK, it was fair to suppose that Ebuyer.com was in for a busy day.
But a £1 clearance sale, which drew customers to the site in volumes eBuyer described as an “overwhelming response”, did anything but optimise on the day's heavy trading.
Reputation Management Issues
The result of the sale was nothing less than calamitous for eBuyer, as a stampede of bargain-hunters brought the site to its knees. The fallout was not just limited to lost sales, but caused reputation management issues that stretched the company's PR team to the limit with a Twitter lambasting that even involved a celebrity Tweeter.
As extraordinary as this may sound, it is not an uncommon occurrence for spikes in traffic and transactions to crash a site, despite the well-known risks of it leading to huge losses in revenue and resultant brand reputation problems.
A Royal eCommerce Disaster
ReissOnline.com, for example, famously came a cropper back in May when Kate Middleton appeared with the Obamas wearing the retailer's now infamous £175 'Shola bandage' dress. Such was the demand the royal association created for the garment that the site was down for a substantial part of the day.
3 Steps to Avoid a Mega Monday Disaster
The question in online retailers' minds will surely be how to prevent this kind of event happening in the first place. The answer lies in the correct management and scaling of servers.
This solution doesn't just serve you well during an eBuyer style 'Mega Monday' promotion either; like light-bulbs, you can switch servers on and off as and when you need to, providing scalability at peak business periods such as evenings and weekends and, of course, Christmas. The ultimate goal is to save those precious pennies. Here are three steps to help your business along this path:
1. Get in the Cloud
If you haven't already, slash your server costs and get in the Cloud. Rackspace and Amazon are good places to start this. Don't be put off by fears of loss of data or lack of control over physical equipment. Arguably, the Cloud is more secure and far more configurable than traditional models. Just doing this can and will change the nature of your business for the better.
2. Tool Up!
Investigate services such as Rightscale to really begin to see scaling in action and explore other complementary tools such as Puppet and Chef. The tools are now available to provide pretty much everything you need to automate scalability and much, much more.
3. Build Around the Business
Remember, your IT department is there to serve your business, not the other way round. Your server environment is no exception. Make sure your team understands your business needs before implementation begins.
These pointers will help you save money, gain extra control and enhance configuration around your core ecommerce environment. Most of all, the scalable nature of servers in the Cloud will allow your business to react quickly to peaks in traffic and minimise system outages.
Open Plus and Scalable Servers in the Cloud
Open Plus is an expert retail systems consultancy, providing robust and scalable systems for high-growth ecommerce and multichannel retailers. Find out how we can deliver scalable servers in the Cloud with our free Systems Review Service.
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