Web shops and Black Friday

Is your web shop ready for Black Friday or any similar online campaign that would cause significantly more traffic to your site?

The pandemic marked this year and people are increasingly opting for online shopping instead of visiting stores. At the same time, the shopping mania better known as "Black Friday" is approaching.

As a web shop owner, you probably prepared everything on time. You have created a new price list, updated the product catalog in the web shop, updated the prices on the site and prepared campaigns on social networks. You are completely ready for Black Friday!

Now you are eagerly waiting for the campaign to bear fruit, for customers to start visiting your web shop and start buying your products.

Friday dawned, the campaign started well and customers started ordering early in the morning. There is no end to your happiness. Finally, all the effort, hard work and investment paid off. Google Analytics shows an increasing number of visits. You rub your hands with satisfaction and you are already celebrating your great success.

However, despite such a large number of visits and initial sales success, online orders are stopping and starting to decline rapidly. You are anxiously checking to see if your social media campaign is working properly. Everything works perfectly!

You also check if your site is active and you come across a strange situation. You can log in to the site, but it works noticeably slower. Okay, maybe it's just slower for you, you click "buy". Everything seems fine, but time starts to pass and nothing happens. You do not receive any message, the checkout page does not open! There is no message from the payment gateway.

You start to panic and hurriedly call the web admin to fix the problem. He tests the site and very quickly tells you the painful truth. Your site is barely working and due to the large number of visits and parallel orders, it seems to have failed. Time passes in trying to fix something, but there is simply nothing you can do right now to save your Black Friday triumph. There are negative comments on social networks, and a lot of people see that because you have invested a lot in the online campaign!

Unfortunately, out of a lot of preparation, effort and money, this has really become Black Friday for you, but in that negative sense. A complete fiasco and a missed opportunity.

This is not a fictional nightmare. This is a very realistic scenario in case you forgot one very important thing in the preparations for Black Friday: Is your web shop ready for Black Friday in every way?

Recommendations for web shop owners

1. Can my current hosting package be a weak link in my web shop?

An old saying goes: I’m not rich enough to buy cheap. The folk sage thus meant that something cheap can often turn out to be very expensive. Cheap often does not offer all the features you expect, which is completely normal and expected from the basic economy and sound business logic.

Is it worth saving a little on hosting if it can do more harm than good?

Translated into the context of this text, this means that cheaper hosting services do not offer all the benefits you get by renting a "more expensive" service. Fortunately for you, even these more professional services are not much more expensive if you think carefully. Is it worth saving a few thousand dinars if, on the other hand, you lose a lot more with unrealized sales and already invested funds in the development of the site, campaign, work?

mCloud services allow you to scale resources (and therefore costs) according to a specific need at a particular time. This story above, which we wrote about, would have a happy ending if the client could independently and temporarily increase his hosting (without the title of provider) until the campaign and the big visit pass. For just one day or a couple of days as needed. Without stopping the campaign, sales, lost time in trying to solve the problem. In a few minutes after discovering the difficult work of the site, his web admin was able to expand the service by twice or ten or more times in terms of resources and continue to work without interruption.

At the end of the campaign, the resources could be returned to the initial state the next day, and all that without the title of provider, interruptions in work, stress.

From this we can easily conclude that the hosting package can be a key factor that decides the success or failure of your web sales. If you are the owner of a web shop, put on paper the math lost / invested in both scenarios and everything will be clear to you.

2. Can the hosting provider provide the necessary technical and professional support to my site and web shop?

The number of visits, especially on days when the action is active on the site, is expected to jump sharply and thus put more strain on your site and server. With this load, the visitor may notice a slower opening of the site, which has a negative impact and the probability that the client will close the site is higher. This is especially a problem with e-commerce sites because there will be no purchase and this directly affects sales. E-commerce sites often have increased use of CPU and RAM resources, especially if they are in addition to something else such as WooCommerce in addition to WordPress, and for this reason this way of working is more demanding than a CMS intended just for a shop (such as is PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento and others).

If we add to that the potentially higher number of subscriptions to the newsletter, the increased number of messages from the site, comments, simultaneous chat sessions, which is realistically expected during Black Friday, then it is clear that more available CPU and RAM resources can save your online sale.

In addition, our technical support experts are at your disposal for all consultations, possible problems and questions.

3. Is my site fast enough to meet the needs of customers on the web shop?

Speed is never enough, but it needs to be realistic. Without the application of the mentioned solutions from the previous lines, do not expect an excessively fast site if it has a significantly increased visit. This is especially true of large sites and webshops. The architecture and structure of the site largely determine its speed, but without the proper hosting service you will not have a site that will be fast enough during increased traffic and a large number of visits.

That's exactly what you don't want to happen to your site during the Black Friday mania, right?

That is why it is important to know that investing in your web shop is no longer an expense, but an investment that can pay off very quickly. Regardless of the current Covid 19 situation, the number of online web shops is increasing rapidly from year to year. And in order for your web shop to be able to serve your customers, especially during promotions like Black Friday, you need to provide it with an appropriate and reliable hosting infrastructure.