Speed and performance optimization - Cart-Power

Gowholesale – High-Load Marketplace With a Wide Range of Products Available for Resellers

Cart-Power Team — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 10:54:09 +0000

A high-load marketplace with a wide range of products available for resellers

The marketplace presents products and operates on a business-to-business model, where vendors are manufacturers and wholesalers, and buyers are retail companies and resellers.
The site presents more than 300K products of a wide range.

Main goals

The client contacted us immediately after the project launch with a request to make several modifications and with a complaint about the low working speed. Despite the fact that the site was provided with the best infrastructure, the speed has been dropping from traffic and unoptimized loads. The mobile app didn’t work at all. In addition, the site code was in such a state that when any modification was made it led to fatal errors.

We were faced with the following tasks:

Perform a complete code refactoring.
Optimize site working speed.
Improve the mobile app.
Improve the next list of functionality: search, synchronization with Shopify, payment, integration, communication with customers.

Our work process

When we just touched on code optimization, we realized that everything needed to be redone completely. Multiple modifications were not functional, so we created new functionality and optimized and improved the code.

In order for the marketplace to sell and remain operational, we optimized the work of the catalog, products, and the ordering process.

Catalog search

Since the site contains a huge number of products, the search should work as quickly as possible so as not to make buyers wait for a response. Initially, a third-party solution from Elasticsearch was proposed for this. But certain existing store modifications did not work with this add-on, which led to issues such as displaying products without a price, pictures, etc. Negotiations and attempts to finalize the add-on were not successful.

Therefore, we developed our own fast Elasticsearch, and remade the code so that anyone can extend it for their modifications in the future.

Customer communication system

We created chats for communicating with clients and vendors so that all messages from one buyer are formed into a single chat. We added the ability to attach files and products directly to the chat. Customers can click on the message directly from the chat, add the product to cart and buy it immediately. This serves as an additional source of promotion and sales.

Sending emails to a list of users with one button. Each item will be sent as a separate message to each user. And in order to reduce the load on the server, we created a queue for sending no more than 200 letters at a time.

As a result, 368,000 messages were sent in 2 months, and more than 7,700 chats were created.

Mobile app

The app’s start page took more than 40 seconds to load because the mobile app had to access the main site. As a result, users were switching to the web version of the store. The percentage of failures due to slow operation was very high.
Thanks to query optimization, the load on the server has decreased, application data has become processed and transmitted faster.

Mobile application traffic increased 3 times.

Installment purchases

Resellers order more than the average buyer. Therefore, their order totals can be significant. To make shopping more affordable, customers can buy now and pay later thanks to integration with the Klarna and ClearPay payment systems from the Stripe aggregator. This allows you to attract new customers and increase the flexibility in payments on the marketplace.

Sync products with Shopify

Many vendors sell their products on Shopify and use it as their main system. The main add-on for synchronizing products with Shopify did not work correctly and for a long time. The product import has been launched every 24 hours, but did not have enough time to be complete in a day. After vain attempts to finalize this add-on, we made our own. Now the products are synchronized with Shopify in a span of 6 hours, and it is now convenient for vendors to sell on two platforms.

Payment routing

We have changed the logic of payment transfers to vendors. As soon as the order goes into the “sent” status, a transfer of the required amount is immediately sent to the vendor. The admin has the ability to manually adjust the amount, if necessary, directly from the admin panel.

Working with partial returns on the marketplace is always more difficult than in online stores. And there are many partial returns on Gowholesale. We have automated debiting the required part of the amount and part of the commission from the vendor.

New vendor’s products

If a new vendor uploads 200 products, then only their products will be displayed in the updates. We have made it so that the catalog shows a variety of vendor’s products, regardless of sorting by new or popular, products will be ranked in such a way that two new products will be picked from each vendor.

This provides opportunities for new vendors to promote their products.

Separate delivery by regions

If the buyer is not from the UK, but for example from the USA or Europe, then the vendor will see the address of the marketplace, and not the buyer, to send the order. As a result, the products are sent to the marketplace, and the buyer pays for shipping only once.

Individual offers

The client has the opportunity to offer the vendor his own price for the products. In this case, notifications for the vendor are sent via email, but there is no possibility to edit them.
To make offers in a neat format and make them more personalized, our add-on puts these notifications in an editable mode.

Minimizing the risks of loss of profit

In order for customers to make purchases only on the marketplace, and not contact sellers directly, the Vendor communication sanitize add-on automatically strips all contact information from messages. All transactions remain on the side of the marketplace.

Our work results

As a result of work for six months:

1700+

vendors attracted

300к+

placed goods

26к+

purchases made

40%

increased profit

1350+

app downloaded

200+

mobile sales in a month and a half

Services:

Dedicated Development Team

Connect developers that focus only on your project.

Speed and Performance Optimization

Accelerate your store and save your profit

Functionality Development

Add new capacities to your business.

We will find solutions for everyone

Share your idea and we’ll offer an optimal solution

The post Gowholesale – High-Load Marketplace With a Wide Range of Products Available for Resellers first appeared on Cart-Power.

Santechlux – Online Store of Sanitary Ware and Bathroom Accessories

Cart-Power Team — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 08:05:03 +0000

A online store of sanitary ware and bathroom accessories

Santechlux is a plumbing online store with an assortment of 200,000 products of various equipment and accessories for the bathroom. The company has been operating on the market for over 20 years and is the official dealer of well-known brands of sanitary ware and tiles.

Main goals

The owner had a ready-made store, developed for an individual request. The range of products is very large, with many features and options. In addition, the site has implemented a lot of custom improvements and solutions. As a result, the pages have been loaded very slowly.

Fix bugs and increase the speed of the online store.
Platform update.
Improve usability for customers.
Create integrations with external services in order to increase conversions.

Our work process

Website audit and error correction

In order to speed up the site, we conducted a speed and performance audit, formulated a technical task and corrected errors.

Main tasks for speed optimization included:

Working with add-ons and templates – we refactored the code and brought it to a single standard. As a result, the code has become simpler and more readable for machines, and therefore faster.
Installing the SEO for Filters add-on, tweaking according to current links and creating 301 redirects from the old links.
We switched to the MySQLi extension in order to improve the work with the database.

Additional solutions to increase the speed of the site:

Setting up a block cache. Now, when reloading any page, it loads 1.5-2 times faster.

We added lazy loading for blocks, images and heavy content. If it is located outside the visible area of the screen or it does not need to be shown to the client immediately. Images on the page are not loaded all at once, but as the user scrolls to the required page area. This helped improve performance and use site resources sparingly.

We optimized search performance on the site. The longer the search results take to load, the more likely it is that the visitor will leave the page without waiting for the search results.
Each search query on the Santechlux website includes many characteristics. As you can see in the image below, there are more than 900 products in the search results for “shower cabin”. Previously, this request was loaded for about 2 minutes, after code optimization, the request was loaded in less than a second.

Website platform and theme update

While updating the client’s site we encountered layout display errors. We have updated the theme based on the standard Responsive theme, leaving unique templates. It does not affect the platform core files. As a result, updates are easy and painless to apply and it is possible, if necessary, to refine the design.

Features developed

Unit conversion add-on for oversized goods. Now the buyer does not need to calculate how many packs of bathroom tiles he needs to buy in 3 sq.m. The system will do this automatically and show how many pieces are in each package and how many square meters it will cover. The price will also be recalculated, depending on the quantity of the selected product.

Cart auto-calculation. When removing an item from the cart, the page does not need to be updated, the price is recalculated automatically.

The ability to collect sets of products while staying on one page. The system offers products of various categories that may be useful along with the already selected product. By clicking on additional products, the buyer can collect the entire bathroom on one page. First, it saves the client time. And secondly, it stimulates cross-selling and increases the average check.

Virtual categories and additional filters. The product catalog is very detailed and it includes many subcategories. In order to quickly switch and navigate through products, we have added virtual categories to the pages and the display of filters on the page.

Expanded the information in the product page. The website presents a large number of physical stores. For convenience, the product page now has a list of stores with the address, work schedule and product status: in stock or on order.

Since the assortment is large, special mechanisms have been developed for quickly and conveniently uploading product lists for promotion on third-party services: Yandex, Avito, Retail Rocket, Diginetica. Each service has its own individual solution.

Our work results

Thanks to the optimized code and bug fixes, the site loading speed increased and positions in search results improved. The number of requests has grown from 400 to 3900.

Search time on a site with an assortment of 200K products was reduced from 2 minutes to less than a second.

Thanks to integration with third-party services, the site received additional promotion channels. As a result, the site’s traffic grew to 100,000 visits per month. Sales increased 3 times.

Updating the store is easy and it excludes the possibility of design errors.

Services:

Speed and Performance Optimization

Accelerate your store and save your profit

Upgrade CS-Cart

We guarantee safe upgrading without losing data.

Integration for Stores and Marketplaces

Sync your store with CRM, marketplaces, shipping and payment systems

Dedicated Development Team

Connect developers that focus only on your project.

We will find solutions for everyone

Share your idea and we’ll offer an optimal solution

The post Santechlux – Online Store of Sanitary Ware and Bathroom Accessories first appeared on Cart-Power.