E-Commerce sector in India has seen unprecedented growth in last few years. Huge investment by Investors on companies like Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Amazon shows an immense growth potential of the market. Companies catering to specific categories like Urban Ladder, Lenskart, Bluestone, HealthKart have also attracted investments and fulfilling the specific need of the consumers. Various factors like cost effective smart phone, customer confidence in online transactions and introduction of Cash on Delivery (COD) also helped E-Commerce companies to reach to bigger audience.
“The Indian e-commerce market will reach billion in 2015 a 70 percent increase over 2014 revenue of billion according to Gartner Inc. ”
Due to competitive nature of business, rapid development and deployment of e-commerce sites have become important and leave little time for technical planning. After launch, many e-business sites have discovered that existing hardware infrastructure and/or software architecture is not adequate to handle the customers load during sale, deal or discount period.
Many reports on internet published show the loss of billions of dollar due to poor performance of e-commerce site and abandonment of shopping cart.
“Immediately after four seconds there is a loss of one-third of the visitors who abandon the site, based on the latest Akamai research.“
On performance perspective, speed and scalability are primary drivers as a good speed site always shows excellent conversion rates. It is observed that many E-commerce businesses start facing performance issues within few months of site launch and these issues start hampering their businesses during sale, discount and deal period.
To improve performance, analysis needs to be done on each tier i.e. presentation, business and database to identify the weak section and suitable architecture/technological changes is to be applied.
Hosting plays a crucial role in site performance. Hosting infrastructure should not only be stable but also have the ability to scale up/down based on traffic load. Many hosting providers have scale up/down option along with pay-as-you-go pricing. Good and stable hosting helps E-commerce technical team to focus on business features instead of worrying about network and infrastructure issues.
Content Delivery Network as well browser level caching significantly improve performance at presentation tier. Additional improvement can be done by using the caching at Load Balancer level or taking help of reverse proxy servers. Caching of static components helps in reducing the traffic on main servers.
Adding more computing power to business tier helps to take in more traffic load. Computing capacity can be increased of existing server (scale-up) or more servers will be added (scale-out). Scaling process should be automatic so that more computing resources can be added during peak period while normal computing power remains during lean period. A load balancer is helpful to distribute load among server based on algorithms like Round-robin, lead used, etc.
Many times scale up/out of business tier creates performance issues at Database tier. In-memory caching solution like Memcached, Redis help the site to cache products and reduce load on database servers. Scaling up of database as well as Master Slave architecture is also helpful in many situations.
If you are getting performance or scalability related issue on your E-commerce infrastructure, we are here to help to migrate your infrastructure on a more scalable platform.