How eCommerce startups can scale their storefronts without downtime

Growing an ecommerce business brings a wave of new opportunities, but also comes with more than a few technical challenges.

As your business gains traction and expands its user base, you’ll need to ensure your site can handle the uptick in traffic seamlessly and continue to deliver the best customer experience possible.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to scale an ecommerce business and hit your goals sooner, while avoiding some of the common pitfalls that can lead to downtime.

Embrace Rapid Experimentation and Data-Driven Scaling

One of the biggest challenges when growing an ecommerce operation comes from business owners scaling blindly. 

This often looks like throwing money at pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, expanding their product lines before they’ve been properly validated, or investing too much in inventory.

To avoid the problems these habits can create, ecommerce businesses should try to adopt a leaner, startup-inspired approach that identifies what’s working through experimentation, then focusing on scaling those high-value activities.

At a basic level, this type of growth framework has three key stages:

Step 1: Run Experiments

Start off by rolling out a busy calendar of A/B tests on variables such as pricing strategies, checkout journeys, and ad creatives to gather real, impartial data on what’s resonating with your unique customer base.

Step 2: Divert Budget to Your Experiment Winners

Once your experiments are complete and you’ve identified some clear winners, start investing in these practices aggressively rather than having your resources spread across multiple different channels and content iterations.

Step 3: Automate or Outsource Repetitive Activities

Once you’ve identified the kinds of growth activities that are generating the most value through experimentation, and organised the process using specific templates and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), try to find ways you can automate or delegate different elements of these activities. 

Whether this means investing in software that requires minimal human input or outsourcing processes to freelancers. This phase will free up your bandwidth and allow you to develop your long-term strategy.

Build a Site That Handles Traffic Spikes Seamlessly

When you first launched your ecommerce store, your site may have been built using basic VPS solutions or shared hosting.

While these solutions can work well at low traffic levels, a sudden spike of traffic from a successful marketing drive can cause this kind of hosting to buckle under pressure, causing slow-loading pages, technical issues at the checkout, and even total site crashes.

All of these issues can wreak havoc on your sales and your brand’s reputation, causing a major setback for your growth and forcing you to make up for lost progress.

Implementing load balancing, optimizing large site assets for fast loading, and using autoscaling cloud hosting can all be effective ways to set your website up as a scalable ecommerce platform that can handle sudden spikes in traffic.

Whichever approach you use, having this foundation set up for your website will remove one major technical consideration as you focus on scaling your business and bringing higher levels of traffic to your site.

Diversify and Systematize Growth Past PPC

Many ecommerce startups rely on Meta and Google ads exclusively for their customer acquisition. 

If you’ve been focused on paid ads long enough to know what works, you may be comfortable with your business’s rate of growth from this particular channel. 

However, unexpected changes to ad platforms’ algorithms and rising cost-per-mille for competitive product keywords can eat into your profits and abruptly damage your organic growth.

To safeguard your business against this growth, you should try to diversify into more sustainable marketing channels, including but not limited to:

SEO and Content Marketing

Known for its long-term growth potential, SEO and content marketing will allow you to harvest traffic from customers’ normal search behavior, without having to put up the large budgets often required for successful PPC campaigns.

Targeting commercial and informational intent keywords, e.g. “best yoga mats for home workouts” and creating buyers’ guides or product comparisons can attract plenty of traffic from users who are already looking for products like yours.

Increasingly, it’s also important to optimize product pages for AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT, maximizing the chances that your site will be linked to from AI summaries and chats.

Affiliate and Influencer Partnerships

Offering recurring commissions to affiliate marketers that align with your budget and growth targets can help you align external touchpoints with your brand identity and ensure you’re getting traffic from a user experience that’s closer to your customer journey compared to a more generic Google search.

It’s also worth planning to partner with micro-influencers who offer both cheap partnerships and high rates of engagement. 

Finding the right profiles for these kinds of campaigns can help you generate sales for a lower price point and give you increased control over choosing the first points of contact that match your brand identity.

Community-Based Marketing

Making your brand seen on online spaces like Reddit, Discord, and other relevant discussion groups can be another effective way to diversify your marketing channels and generate more organic traffic to your store.

Just make sure you’re taking note of each community’s rules, and maintaining your brand reputation by sharing helpful, organic content rather than anything that’s too aggressive and “salesy”.

Craft an Omnichannel Shopping Experience

Omnishannel shopping has been the default with your larger competitors for some time now. Because of this, it’s likely that a large proportion of your customers are going to be expecting the same experience from you.

Today, it’s normal for shoppers to browse products on Instagram, place their order on Amazon, then re-order via email when supplies are running low. If you’re not facilitating this kind of experience, you could risk being left behind by your close competitors, and stalling while you try to scale.

Some of the key tactics you can use to build an omnichannel experience include:

• Synchronising your inventory across Amazon, Shopify, your DTC store, and any other channels you use to sell.
• Using multi-channel fulfillment solutions to guarantee fast and competitive shipping.
• Upgrading your customer support with live chat, SMS support, and other kinds of communication to resolve issues quickly when things go wrong.

Get Ahead of Seasonal Peaks

Finally, making sure your DTC site is fully prepared for Black Friday, Christmas, and similar seasonal peaks is fundamental for scaling your ecommerce business while avoiding downtime.

The sudden waves of traffic that come with these points in the calendar can be a huge opportunity for growth, but failing to prepare for them will only create disgruntled customers and delay progress towards your long-term goals.

Convene with your developers ahead of time, and make sure you’re covered for holiday rushes with some fundamental technical checks, such as:

• Load-testing your servers for traffic spikes.
• Pre-warming CDN caches to ensure your PDPs load quickly.
• Temporarily scaling your customer support with temps or AI chatbots.

Scaling Your Startup The Right Way

Scaling an ecommerce business is an exciting process, but avoiding the pitfalls that come with it is something you can’t afford to forget. By planning to enhance your business’s infrastructure readiness, diversifying your marketing channels, and providing a seamless omnichannel experience, you can work towards your growth goals efficiently, without suffering periods of downtime.

For more support with scaling your ecommerce business, be sure to browse some of our other blog posts, or check out our range of responsive ecommerce themes and take your store to the next level.