What is e-commerce scalability?

Definition of e-commerce scalability

E-commerce scalability is the ability to scale your e-commerce platform to accommodate the needs of your business’s online growth.

Why is e-commerce scalability a must-have?

A study conducted by Google revealed that 53% of mobile users abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Having an e-commerce site that you can easily scale to accommodate your web store’s growing audience is therefore crucial. Back in 2018, Amazon’s website couldn’t handle the surge in Prime Day web traffic, and customers who were looking to finalize a purchase were redirected to the homepage and were left unable to check out. This issue lasted for an hour and it was estimated that it cost Amazon about $1,000,000 per minute because it occurred during the peak hours of Prime Day.

There’s a big lesson to be learned from this huge mistake, and it all comes down to scalability, scalability, scalability! If your business isn’t scalable, it won’t last.

What do you need to do to achieve true e-commerce scalability?

True e-commerce scalability must check the following boxes, especially during peak volume shopping season:

Reliable performance for high order volumes: Contrary to popular belief, a scalable system isn’t necessarily a reliable system. Just because your system can expand without fundamentally changing it doesn’t mean it will do so gracefully. A reliable system won’t break or cease to work when the workload increases.
Peak traffic: When your web store receives a high volume of visitors, performance can be scaled vertically with more hardware or horizontally with additional servers.
Load balancing: It’s essential that your web store can perform load balancing to ensure optimal use of your servers, guaranteeing a reliable, speedy experience that your customers will love while shopping on your web store.
Lazy loading: Lazy loading is another great way to improve your web store’s performance. This technology delays image loading (content and product images) on long web pages.
Uptime: A reliable web store needs to have a reliable hosting system that never fails you.
Multiple stores and brands: A scalable e-commerce platform is one that allows you to have multiple stores and brands all under one platform.

Discover the other functions that your web store needs to have to be scalable, adapt, and grow with your business — read more on the benefits of scalable e-commerce platforms for your business.

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