E-commerce is currently experiencing turbulent growth. According to data collected by PwC in the report "Prospects for the development of the e-commerce market in Poland," this market is growing by approximately 12% annually, reaching a value of 162 billion złotys by 2026. However, owners of online stores know that selling online is not that simple. It often happens that trivial problems with IT infrastructure can "shut down" an online store or hinder its development.

One of the most common problems for online stores is bandwidth issues. This is primarily manifested by slow page loading, causing the loss of users. Hawatel experts often notice such problems relatively frequently among new clients.

Check out our previous article. We wrote about the Citrix Application Delivery Controller!

Inefficient IT infrastructure in an online store

There can be many reasons for the slow operation of an online store, including:

• Inadequate bandwidth relative to the number of customer visits
• Slow DNS servers
• Servers poorly matched in terms of their maximum performance
• Issues with load balancers
• Poorly written application source code in terms of performance
• Failure to adapt infrastructure for marketing campaigns that periodically increase the number of concurrent visiting customers

All of the above reasons indicate improperly designed and mismatched IT infrastructure. Therefore, we encourage you to contact us and take advantage of the experience accumulated over the years at Hawatel.

Why improve IT infrastructure in an online store?

Another report prepared by PwC provides data on how improving the IT infrastructure of an online store translates into higher profits. "Milliseconds make Millions" is an excellent source because it is based on real data obtained from 37 brands from the USA and Europe, collected over 4 weeks.

Why take care of e-commerce infrastructure? Here's what a 0.1-second increase in store loading speed can bring:

• An 8.4% increase in conversion rates for retail customers and a 9.2% increase in average order value
• A 10.1% increase in conversion rates in the tourism industry and a 1.9% increase in average order value
• For luxury brands, an 8% increase in page views per session was observed
• The bounce rate for lead generation informational pages improved by 8.3%,
• Retail customer engagement increased by 5.2%.

And all this thanks to web pages being 0.1 seconds faster! That's why it's worth taking care of the IT infrastructure in your e-commerce business.

How to improve IT infrastructure in an online store?

Improving infrastructure should start with analysis and audit to gather as much data as possible about the current state. It is particularly important to track current user traffic and identify all so-called bottlenecks. The next step is to design appropriate infrastructure, taking into account current and future loads.

If an online store experiences both periodic and unpredictable spikes in network traffic, then migrating to the public cloud and using automatic server scaling mechanisms may be a good solution. This solves the problem of unavailability or slowdowns of stores on days like Black Friday. At the same time, we do not incur high costs for scaled infrastructure throughout the year; we only pay for resources that have actually been used.

When improving IT infrastructure, it is worth ensuring the performance of the database and optimizing it for performance. Sometimes improving a single database index can speed up the store by several hundred percent.

If you want to to learn more, contact us!