Scalable Hosting Sells More Merch
Launching new merchandise or affiliate products can create buzz around your brand and increase revenue. But it can also spur massive traffic and crash your website.
What’s needed is a proactive approach to prevent downtime.
This post addresses three strategies to sell new merch and affiliate products without fear of downtime.
Switch to Scalable Hosting
Standard web hosting typically allocates fixed capacity and server resources — RAM, CPU — to accommodate only a set amount of traffic at one time.
However, selling merchandise and affiliate products could require hundreds (or even thousands) of concurrent requests, causing a fixed-capacity server to crash. The result is a loss of revenue and customer trust.
The answer is a cloud-based scalable hosting, such as Cloudways Autonomous, where server capacity automatically adjusts based on demand. Scalable hosting can handle sudden traffic surges without compromising on performance.
Cloudways Autonomous automatically adjusts server capacity based on demand.
Cloudways Autonomous uses sophisticated load balancing, a key feature of its Kubernetes architecture. This spreads the traffic across multiple pods (i.e., servers), eliminating single points of failure and maximizing availability.
Moreover, Cloudways Autonomous’s integrated content delivery network and advanced caching reduce the load by serving static and dynamic content from locations closer to the users.
Thus a true auto-scaling web host eliminates the need for constant monitoring and manual server scaling. And the built-in Cloudflare Enterprise filters incoming traffic to prevent security threats.
Run a Test Launch
Another way to prepare for high traffic levels is to run a test launch that gauges product demand without making the products available to purchase. After assessing demand, you can prepare your site accordingly.
You’ll need a way to identify prospective buyers. Many websites set up a “coming soon” feature that functions as a pre-launch landing page. This often includes product information and photos but doesn’t allow visitors to add items to the cart.
Then use analytics to track page views or let visitors indicate interest by completing surveys or simple forms on your landing page or social media. You might even enable pre-orders.
See “WooCommerce BFCM: Are You Ready?” for solutions to holiday traffic surges.
Offer Presale Registration or Early Access
The final method for selling more merch and affiliate products while preventing downtime is to offer presale registration or early access. This avoids traffic spikes from items becoming available to all shoppers at once.
Stagger site visits to reduce the load on your server and prevent crashes. Consider offering early access to the products to a group of shoppers, such as your most loyal buyers.
You could also set up a virtual waiting room to control surges in traffic. This method is common on Ticketmaster and similar sites. It enables you to redirect some visitors to a waiting room and then throttle them back to the main site when appropriate.
A virtual waiting room enables sellers to redirect visitors to a dedicated page and then throttle them back when appropriate. Source: Ticketmaster.
Alternatively, a “coming soon” page could include an opt-in form to subscribe to your mailing list. You could then send presale registration forms or invitation codes to those subscribers.
About Cloudways Autonomous
Cloudways Autonomous by Digital Ocean is fully managed WooCommerce and WordPress hosting that auto-scales to meet the needs of growing businesses without fear of downtime or slow performance. Access Cloudflare Enterprise, 24×7 expert support, DDoS mitigation, advanced tools, and much more — all with affordable plans. Visit Cloudways Autonomous for more.
