These days cloud based elastic scaling is advertised as a standard offering by many eCommerce hosting companies.  The premise behind the offering is that the hosting service will be able to scale out (more servers) or up (more resources – ie. RAM – added to the existing server) to meet high traffic demand and scale back to save money on resources once traffic goes back to normal.  This ensures your site is always stable and fast while minimizing cost of server resources. While elastic scaling may be perceived and marketed as a standard cloud feature, we have found that the mechanics and effectiveness of it can vary vastly from one hosting provider to the next.  In fact, we know of very few truly awesome and seamless elastic scaling solutions for eCommerce.

The Good 

Some hosting services like Webscale can provide truly seamless elastic scaling. Their technology automatically detects surges in traffic and server utilization and delivers additional scaled out resources in real time without any manual intervention or site performance degradation.  Once the demand subsides the resources are automatically scaled back, again with no manual intervention, keeping cloud resource costs at a minimum. And it actually works as advertised delivering great performance and value.

The Bad

Many cloud hosting companies have the ability to scale out/up automatically but scaling back down requires manual work through an admin dashboard or ticketing system.  The issue with having to manually scale back down is that you will spend a lot more on resources, since during peak traffic seasons (ie. holiday) it doesn’t make sense to be manually scaling back resources until the season is over.  So while it’s nice to know you have the assurance of performance and uptime from the ability to autoscale out/up, the cost for resources is much higher during high volume events.

The Ugly

Some cloud hosting companies that advertise elastic scaling are limited to manual scaling out/up and back in a fashion very similar to bare medal where servers can be added to the cluster but only on a planned schedule manually by technicians.  Scaling out/up often times requires planning months in advance to increase the resources for a high traffic season (ie. holidays) and includes signed approvals for increased cost of resources and must be performed in coordination with the hosting company technical team.  There are typically no tools for site administrators to manage resources on their own through a dashboard and if traffic peaks are higher than expected the site can experience slow performance or even worse downtime. Adding resources to immediately address demand (ie. Black Friday peak) is typically not possible since it requires days, if not weeks (depending on how busy the hosting company’s technicians are), to manually add more resources.

Conclusion

If you’re in the market for eCommerce hosting be sure to ask your prospective providers lots of questions about what they are advertising for cloud (elastic) scaling and carefully examine the elastic scaling fine print in the contract.  Also, if you think you are on a service that provides automatic elastic scaling double-check with your provider on the mechanics and details of how it works. You don’t want to wait until a peak traffic event to find out that your servers don’t auto scale the way you thought they would.  To get more details or find out who the “The Ugly” providers are mentioned above (off the record of course:) please contact us.

It’s that time of year again, the holidays are soon approaching and you – the online merchant – are preparing promotions and marketing for the unofficial kick off to the Holiday Season – Black Friday Week. One of the concerns you likely have leading up to the holidays is how your site will perform when handling large volumes of traffic. Will your site experience slow load performance or downtime on Black Friday or during the week of Cyber Monday?  This is indeed a valid concern since slow performance, or even worse yet, site down time, can be very costly, both literally in terms of lost sales and, as importantly, from an overall brand perspective. Many times users abandon their shopping activities on sites that are running slow or timing out.  As well, performance issues or site downtime cause major damage to brand reputation as many users never return to sites that have failed during their shopping experience – and may tell their friends about the poor experience.

While you may have prepared your site for traffic peaks with auto scaling and other enhancements, there is no way to tell how much traffic and order volume your site can take without performance load testing.

Website performance load testing is a process that utilizes technology tools (bots) to simulate traffic, usage and orders on your site so you can measure the performance page speed and response of your site under different volumes of traffic.  Performance testing should be setup and performed on a site-by-site basis because every website has different usage patterns and behavior. So the first step in successful load testing is to review Google Analytics data and see how users are engaging with the site to make a purchase.  Then the load testing bots can be programmed to simulate the site usage of the actual site users. Once all the simulations have been created, the testing bot is sent to browse a replica of the production site like an actual user, browsing products, adding items to the cart, applying coupons, using the wishlist and checking out, etc.  (A replica site is used because you wouldn’t want to sack your production site with thousands of fake transactions.) The bot is set to mimic as many usage patterns as needed and programmed to maintain certain levels of activity that replicate different volumes of user traffic.

When we run load tests for our clients, we are able to measure the site page speed and errors at various simulated levels of traffic and ultimately ascertain the level of traffic a site can serve before breaking down. After successfully load testing a site we are able to – with a high degree of confidence – tell exactly how much traffic a website can safely serve at any given time.

That’s all well and good you might say, but is it really worth the investment?  For sites expecting high traffic volume promotions or for sites with deals that go viral on social media, we absolutely see the payoff.  Knowing how much traffic your site can handle before performance starts to degrade is critical for promotion planning. If you know the peak number of shoppers per hour your site can handle without performance degradation then you can be very strategic about how you schedule email promotions and social announcements so that you avoid pushing to many users to the site with a marketing blast.  For example, we’ve had merchant clients go through the performance testing process and develop an understanding of their safety threshold for max traffic. This allows them to change their marketing strategy to promote discounts and sales days ahead of time, or days after Black Friday, to reduce the risk of getting too much traffic at one time.

While load testing does require some investment in time and money it can prove a very wise method for maximizing revenue by avoiding performance related issues that negatively affect conversion and site reputation.  For more information on how we can help you determine your peak traffic threshold, optimize performance and help you better prepare for the biggest retail time of the year, please contact us.

The Search module for your eCommerce site can be a powerful tool that can significantly contribute to  your long-term success. The Search module has a unique ability to directly connect customers with their desired product while also giving you the information needed to improve multiple aspects of your business.

In this week’s blog we’re going to be discussing the best Magento 2 Site Search modules and how they can impact your eCommerce business.

(To learn more about how your Magento search function can help to go even further towards improve your SEO and inventory management, don’t miss last week’s blog, “4 Ways to Improve Your SEO with Magento’s Search Terms Report”.)

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is native to Magento 2 and it is used on such high-volume sites as eBay, Wikipedia, and GitHub. All big names, but none of these sites are eCommerce sites. Elasticsearch requires a the use of a number of additional extensions to expand its capabilities and make it truly useful  for smaller businesses.

Another major downside to relying on Elasticsearch for your site’s search functionality is that the module is server intensive, so you need to be on a dedicated server or have upgraded to a cloud hosting platform. Because of these server constraints we do not recommend Elasticsearch for merchants whose sites are doing less than $3 million in total revenue, see less than 150,000 visitors per month or feature less than 10,000 SKUs. If your site  meet any of these criteria then we recommend using a 3rd party search engine because of the additional features they offer as well as the server assistance they provide, as any 3rd party search provider is going to handle all of the search activity on their servers, leaving yours to be dedicated to page itself.

Klevu

Klevu is an easy to implement, low maintenance on-site search tool that is incorporates machine learning to accomplish a lot of the optimization and maintenance that is normally done manually on Elasticsearch.

Klevu’s machine learning abilities develops an ongoing understanding of how your customers are engaging with the search features, expanding its knowledge as it accumulates more information. The result of this process  optimizes search results to get customers’ better search results.. The autocomplete feature offers helpful suggestions and creates a more convenient and pleasant shopping experience for your customers. This all leads to more sales which benefits of your business.

Klevu is extremely scalable and prices start at just $499 per month. The platform offers a great, self managed dashboard that is easy to understand and navigate. While the lower tiered Klevu offerings do not come with a dedicated account manager or onboarding technician, there are more Enterprise-level plans that come with a dedicated account manager and technical support if that is something that you and your company desire.

Nextopia

Magento is known for its customizable abilities and Nextopia’s site search module was created in that same vein. Nextopia was built to cater to the unique needs of B2B merchants, and is a fully customizable search solution designed to be coded to match the HTML of your eCommerce site.

In addition to the B2B focus and superior customization capabilities, Nextopia offers exceptional North American customer support (based in Canada) with a dedicated account manager, no matter what level of customer you are. Nextopia’s support extends beyond the initial set-up and launch of your search module, throughout the life of your contract. This includes monthly status meetings designed to recap your search results and teach first-time users how to better understand the search reports and integrate them into an eCommerce strategy. After Nextopia clients feel comfortable with the module, these monthly recaps change to quarterly status meetings and can be booked as needed.

Conclusion

While there are other 3rd party site search options available for Magento, we recommend ElasticSearch to someone that’s on a dedicated server or higher level hosting that can support that service, and has a team capable of ongoing management. Klevu is our favorite ‘plug and play’ option with awesome capabilities, while Nextopia is very scalable for B2B businesses or sites with more complex catalogs, such as automotive sites with vehicle fitment data. Many other site search options have a more expensive, more drawn out on-boarding process that we find to be overkill.

We could talk about Magneto extensions all day. If you have questions about what Search Module is right for you, need assistance with Magneto 1’s upcoming end-of-life or anything else eCommerce related, call us at to speak with team member today. Or, submit your request via our Contact page and we’ll get in touch with you ASAP.

Are you ignoring that little Search bar at the top of your eCommerce page? Because you shouldn’t be. That little application is too powerful to ignore and can do more than just show visitors what’s in your inventory. It can save you money, improve your search ranking and increase your sales – all while making your customers’ shopping experience easier and more convenient. In this blog we’ll cover the four ways to improve your SEO using Magento’s Search Terms report.

What Customers Want

The Magento Search Term Report is a list of search terms and how often they have been used on your site.  The search terms come from when your site visitors directly type keyword phrases in the search box for products on your site. The Magento Search Term Report is thus a very effective and accurate tool when it comes to understanding what customers want from your business and what they likely will search for on the public search engines like Google. The most popular and frequent terms on your search report can become the backbone of your SEO strategy. By building an SEO strategy around the most frequently used terms on your Search Term Report, you can be assured that you’re not wasting resources on keywords aren’t relevant to your business.  Paying attention to the Search Terms Report is also an opportunity to adjust your offerings and inventory. If visitors are continually searching your website for a product or service you do not offer, perhaps it’s time to add it to your product catalog.

Zero Results

If there is a disconnect between ‘what you think your customers want from your business’ and ‘what your customers actually want from your business’ the Search Terms Report will shine a light on it. Compare the results for your Search Terms Report with your SEO keywords. If you’re including keywords in your SEO that no one is searching for on your site, this gives you the opportunity to adjust your keyword strategy and perhaps even your inventory.

Synonyms

A simple but effective way to improve your catalogue search is to include alternate terms that a customer may use to describe an item in your inventory. You don’t want to lose out on the sale of a ‘dish’ when your item is listed as a ‘plate’. The Search Terms Report will show you any synonyms that customers may be using to search your site for products. This wider range of terms provided by the Search Terms Report will allow you to direct a much broader range of terms to the same landing page. Meaning that your ‘plate’ product page will show up in searches for ‘bowl’, ‘dish’, ‘cup’, ‘platter’ and more.

Misspellings

To err is human and checking the spelling of any Search inquiries will more than confirm that statement. But misspellings can also be used to improve your SEO. Using your Search Terms Report you can easily capture common misspellings that visitors are typing into your Search and use them to redirect visitors to the appropriate page. For example, if you sell silverware and you see that many visitors to your site are misspelling the word ‘knives’ and are instead searching for ‘knifes’ or ‘nives’ you can include theses misspelled terms in your list of synonyms for ‘knives’. This will allow for visitors using misspelled searches to be directed towards the pages and products they were initially searching for.  Better yet, we recommend using a search technology like Elastic Search that automatically factors in most of the common misspellings. But even with a search technology like Elastic Search that auto corrects for typos, it’s a good idea to check for misspellings.

To learn more about how to maximize the knowledge and business that be cultivated through the Magento Search Terms report, reach out to one of our certified Magento developers at 513-469-7042 or fill out our contact page and a team member will be in touch with you shortly.

Given the advances of Amazon Prime over the past few years, merchants have been forced to innovate and become more competitive in the shipping and fulfillment arena.  Online shoppers now expect low cost or free shipping delivery options within 2 days as well as very short lead times for buying online and picking up in store (BOPIS).  Fortunately, Magento provides many great tools and capabilities to help merchants deliver what customers expect. When leveraged appropriately merchants using Magento are now able to provide delivery and pickup options that better compete with leading market places such as Amazon and Walmart.

Magento Order Management

The first piece of being able to provide competitive shipping, delivery and pickup options is for the website to have immediate access to product inventory stock and location information. Launched at the beginning of 2019 Magento Order Management makes it possible to orchestrate demand and supply across multiple sales channels and sources of inventory. Merchants are able to:

• Turn stores into mini-distribution centers
• Create and expose a single view of orders and inventory across channels
• Provide customers with flexible omni channel fulfillment options
• Handle complex order & fulfillment needs such as back-orders and BOPIS.
• Intelligently automate sourcing across channels

Providing customers with low cost shipping delivery options and BOPIS requires a robust integration between backend fulfillment systems and the website.  The Magento Order Management product integrates to backend systems and adds a layer of logic below the website that allows Magento to track inventory across the entire warehouse and store network.  By knowing where all product inventories are located Magento is able to offer customers shipping, delivery or pickup options from the closest warehouse or store. This lowers the cost of delivery and BOPIS turn around time, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and options that are competitive with Amazon.

Front-end Logic

In addition to tightly tracking inventory location, a robust delivery and BOPIS strategy also requires complex front-end logic.  Many factors such as store hours, lowest cost carrier, package dimensions, hazmat restrictions, product customization lead time, perishable product specifications and international regulations must be factored in when providing shipping options to customers at checkout.

That logic can either be powered by a 3rd party plugin and/or custom developed on Magento.  Two very popular 3rd party plugins that connect to Magento via API are ShipperHQ and Termando (also known as “Magento Shipping”).  These tools allow site administrators to configure rate quotes based on many factors such as:

• Product and cart weight 
• Product and cart price
• Product dimensions
• Product groups
• Package dimensions
• Customer group
• Shipping zones
• Location (warehouse and shipping)
• Freight
• Major carriers  (Fedex, UPS, USPS and DHL)

Rates can further be filtered via restriction, surcharges, discount and renaming rules to provide customers with highly competitive delivery and pickup options.

If a 3rd party tool does not provide all of the features required, additional customization can be performed.  For instance, a merchant may want to compare rates from the major carriers and pick the lowest cost options for ground, overnight and 2nd day delivery while providing those options to the customer with a discount depending on the total value of the cart or the customer’s life-time value.  For this type of need a custom module can be developed for Magento that works in conjunction with native features or 3rd party plugins. Being flexible enough to accommodate this type of high value customization is one of the things that makes Magento so great.

Conclusions

By leveraging Magento’s great order management and stock tracking technology plus 3rd party tools and customization, merchants are now able to be more competitive with fulfillment giants like Amazon and Walmart.  Smaller merchants might not be able to offer the exact same level of shipping value as the big marketplaces, however by improving their shipping options and relying on other strengths that large marketplaces do not have (ie. brand and customer service) we believe smaller merchants  can win back and gain online market share.