On Thursday 2 June 2022, our team successfully helped one of our customers run a flash sale in their store that broke our previous record for orders per second.
What is a flash sale?
A flash sale is usually defined as a temporary sale/promotion that creates high demand for a short period of time, meaning that the amount of traffic will increase significantly for a short period of time.
Running a flash sale means that the backend performance of your website needs to be as high as possible so that you can serve as many potential customers as possible without the site crashing. This is because the sheer volume of people trying to use the site puts a very high load on the application and servers.
This marketing strategy is especially used by many of our customers who are influencers who have started their own webshops. WooCommerce has given them the freedom to do what they want and follow their dreams at a very competitive price, and this type of marketing works very well for them.
Backend performance matters
If the backend performance is not good enough, the website will crash, produce error messages and be inaccessible for as long as the hosting provider cannot provide the website with internet access.
A new record
This flash sale, produced astonishing results thanks to our client’s amazing marketing efforts. The numbers are so high that it beat all our internal records from 2018 with iDeal of Sweden (10 orders/second on Black Friday), and set a new record in maximum orders per second for us with WooCommerce. We visualise the orders per second, per minute and per hour in the graphs below.
- Max orders per minute: 644
- Max orders per second: 26
- Max data transferred (to browsers, total): 20 Gbit per second
- Max data transferred (HTML/JS/CSS to CDN): 2.126 Gbits per second
We don’t want to disclose the monetary gains achieved by our customers, but we can say that they were significant.
How did we do it?
To be able to achieve these kinds of numbers, it is important to continuously work on performance. We use a tool called Blackfire which, along with years of experience, helps our great team find the bottlenecks.
We’ve been working hard on using methods like ESI (Edge side include) and others to make sure cache invalidation is handled correctly, but we’re also inventing methods to try and offload backend performance at the platform level when using popular WordPress extensions as part of our hosting stack.
Oh, did I mention that we’ve built all of this into our Gutenberg-based MVP project Qala that you can create with us at a really competitive price? We’ve basically spent thousands of hours taking our best learnings and packaging them into a starter project so that even small businesses can benefit from what we’ve done. At the same time, everything is completely open source and customisable, along with a custom design put together by our design team.
Premium hosting
Of course, having premium hosting is also extremely important. What’s especially important is having a dedicated sysadmin overseeing the flash sales. That way, if something goes wrong, you have someone who can apply fixes quickly.
Angry Creative has a hosting subsidiary and dedicated staff for premium hosting called Synotio, and the vertical integration between us means we can accomplish these feats – and we’re very confident that not only will we repeat this feat, together with the right client we’ll surpass it.
Are you running e-commerce with WooCommerce and having problems when traffic starts to increase? Contact us and we will help you.
Or are you an agency running e-commerce with WooCommerce that scales and becomes difficult to manage? Get in touch with us and we’ll find something together where everyone wins.