How To Scale An E-Commerce Platform

Eventually, every brand wants to reach millions or even billions of customers. This is only possible if it can scale its platforms to be able to handle all these users.

The platform must also be able to handle surges in traffic that can happen due to regional holidays, sales, and the like. So, how do you ensure your e-commerce platform is scalable?

Use Cache Effectively

Caching is the storage of copies of files in temporary storage locations. Users can access these files, and they can be invalidated and refreshed if new information is to be served to users.

It reduces the number of requests made to the main server since users will be served with data from the caching server.

This can help speed up a website because users are served with information directly instead of having to wait for it to be fetched from the main server.

Caching can also decrease server costs by decreasing computer time since data has to be compiled once and stored instead of being compiled, fetched, and served with every customer request.

Caching is a win for everyone involved, from the business to the platform and its customers.

Use a CDN

CDNs are similar to caches, but they work differently. CDNs store content in a group of servers around the world so that it is derived from the server that is closest to a user or website visitor.

Content Delivery Networks are typically used together with caches to ensure the availability of data and information and to speed websites up.

CDNs are also crucial for scaling because of the thousands of servers that millions of visitors can access at the same time. If these users were requesting data from one server at the same time, things could go very badly.

Leverage Multi Store E-commerce Platforms

There is no better way to scale than to have a multi store platform. This is a platform with many stores that are all managed at a central place by one administrator.

Multi store e-commerce platforms allow you to share information and inventory between different stores while also making the management of all stories on the same platform easier.

Also, each store on the platform can be targeted toward specific types of customers. If you are a clothing brand, you might have a store for kids, one for gents, and one for ladies.

You can also use a multi store ecommerce platform to have stores for different regions.

Although these platforms would be under the same umbrella, they would have different images, use different languages, have local content, and so on.

Use Proper Hosting and Server Options

Numerous web hosting platforms allow your website to scale up and down as it needs, making them advantageous for websites that have seasonal visitors.

In addition to using such web hosting providers, ensure your hosting option includes an extra server.

This is known as “N + 1” redundancy where the N servers handle all requests and workload in normal conditions and the extra one is spun up as required to handle extraordinary traffic levels.

Every e-commerce platform should scale up and down as required. If not, the servers are likely to go down due to being unable to handle huge spikes in traffic or millions of customers at the same time.

Fortunately, engineers and server administrators have come up with best practices for ensuring platforms can scale as required.