Peaksale preparation

Are you ready for your peak sales?

For any eCommerce application special sales are biggest revenue generator. Statistics indicate special sales contribute to 10-15% of total year revenue. Importance of online applications realized by many vendors during COVID-19. Online applications became the biggest revenue generators during pandemic and became survival of business for some business. It is important that your application is highly available, provide seamless experience across channel and sustain to high volume of users and transactions.

These tips can help you make your apps ready for peak sales.

Prepare your infrastructure

November, December holiday period dominates usage peaks, but depending on your retail strategy, there are other periods when ecommerce sites experience a boost in traffic. Plan enough time before these dates for preparing and testing your ecommerce site or app.

Consider these activities for preparing your Infrastructure

• Define the goals like Target Page views per second.
• Review your infrastructure sizing. If infrastructure is on premises add machines or consider cloud solutions to accommodate high traffic volumes.
• If applications are in the cloud, use autoscaling and load balancing to automatically add instances and distribute traffic
• Create a comprehensive breach-response plan and train employees on how to implement it.
• Leverage the built-in security capabilities of a leading public cloud provider or your CDN, including features that can protect against large DDoS attacks.

Mobile App

Statistics indicate that 70% of all traffic was generated by mobile phones. Mobile eCommerce expected to account for 50% of total eCommerce sales.

Therefore, with your websites, mobile apps or solutions must be in the mix in consideration of these usage peak periods.

Performance Testing

Performance testing validates the speed, scalability or stability of a site or app to achieve response times, throughput and resource-utilization levels that meet the performance objectives.

Types of Tests to Prepare Your Ecommerce Site and App for Usage Peaks

• A load test verifies an application’s behaviour under normal and peak load conditions using simulated traffic to see how many simultaneous users it can handle. This will test performance, but also the back-end stability as that traffic flows in to include: database reliability and locks, “garbage” collection, hit ratios, maximum active sessions, disk queue length, processor and memory usage, coding errors, connectivity and bandwidth tolerance and response time, structural incompatibilities and so on.
• Stress tests validate an application’s behaviour when it is pushed beyond normal or peak load conditions.
• Capacity tests determine how many users or transactions a given system will support and still meet performance goals.
• Soak or endurance tests your website’s endurance against the peak traffic for a longer time, effectively prolonging stress testing for a long duration.
• Spike testing is testing your website’s performance against the sudden increase in traffic from normal to peak.

Client-Side performance Testing

Online customers that enter your web pages expect them to be interactive and designed for a seamless experience. Not only pages have to load fast, but also run smooth with all the animations and interactive objects. The front-end of your page is where the user experience, so take your time and effort to ensure the code on your page runs as efficiently as possible. To create responsive websites and apps, it’s important to understand how HTML, Javascript and CSS are handled.

Use light house Tool in Chrome browser to verify your app page rendering performance. Apply various page optimization techniques

• Use prefetch, preconnect, lazyload techniques.
• Optimize your website images according to screen resolution.
• Use techniques to render view port content.
• Use service worker capabilities to cache static files
• Apply proper file compression techniques
• Minify CSS

Application Performance Monitoring tools

While Performance testing is useful, it is equally important that you monitor your application components in real time and take corrective actions. There are several monitoring tools available that help you monitor

• CPU
• JVM Thread(s)
• Memory utilization
• Bandwidth utilization
• Sockets between components
• Requests
• Tracing requests and analyzing those requests and many more.

Nothing will beat real user interactions with your application in production for the most accurate view. Getting a window into this activity is also a lot easier than you think if you have the right tools.

Use any of these popular tools to monitor your app in real-time.

• New Relic
• App Dynamics
• Dynatrace

Each of the performance monitoring tools above offers something slightly different, but are all built around the same goal — seeing what your users are doing when they encounter problems. Usually,  developers have to hunt around for clues as to why their software is not performing as expected. Application Performance Monitoring tools present the symptoms of the problem in a clear and visual way to aid in diagnosis and ultimate resolution.

Ultimately, performance problems are a huge contributor to dissatisfactory software experiences. Therefore, it’s down to the Infrastructure & software engineering teams to be proactive in making sure their applications are performing for users in the way they are intended.

Teams slow to adopt such visibility stand to lose out to their more innovative competitors that took more care of how users experience their application.

Are you looking for our expertise in optimizing your apps? Reach to us [email protected]