Flash back to January 2012… We helped one of our ecommerce clients get 1,000 orders in just under two hours. They were on Good Morning America (GMA), and it was a success.

This year, they were once again invited back to GMA. They told us “we expect even more volume!” – They weren’t kidding.

This time around, their ShopSite enabled ecommerce store handled 1,000 orders in 40 minutes! Over 250,000 page views in the first hour alone! That is more than double the rate of last year. The best part?

The server and ShopSite ecommerce software performed flawlessly. Not one error, not one hiccup, not one slowdown of their site or cart.

We did all of this on a single server solution – Translation: We kept costs down considerably while maximizing their sales for the TV spot.

How’d we do it?

Three steps were taken:

• 1. Powerful dedicated server (8 cores, 16 GB of RAM)

• 2. Use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for the splash page that GMA linked to for the event. 100% of the page (including the page itself) was on the CDN.

• 3. Using ShopSite ecommerce software that scales well, is fast, and uses very little resources per visitor.

Add in our expertise with handling events like this (proper setup of the server, adjusting server-side resources, etc…) and we had a successful launch.

Can your cart handle an event like this?

If you’re with a third-party service like Volusion or Big Commerce, it’s not likely. It would require some advanced planning, a special environment, and the bandwidth charges would be quite high as well.

If you use an open source solution like Magento, it can be done, but it requires a lot more resources. The whole experience will likely be much slower for your customers, as Magento does a lot of work behind the scenes for every page load. Magento does not scale well under heavy traffic, and ideally needs multiple servers and a lot of hand-holding to avoid falling over.

We helped a Magento ecommerce client over Christmas with a national TV spot. It was a success, but it was a struggle to keep things up and running, more server-side hardware resources were needed, and the cart and page loads were noticeably slower during heavy traffic.

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If you’re looking for a new ecommerce application that is fast, scales well, and is optimized for SEO, ShopSite is the right choice. Combined with our experience and ShopSite add-ons, we make it a top choice for successful merchants of any size. All of this without the need for multiple servers or complex cloud set ups that are expensive.

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