Are you getting ready for the holidays? Modern Retail started gearing up for the holiday soon after the 2011 holiday season. This spring we made several key enhancements to our infrastructure:
- we added additional capacity to improve the performance of your website
- we migrated all messaging to SendGrid.
We had no problems keeping up with your holiday traffic last year. However, we thought it prudent to add some additional capacity to our systems. The upgrades resulted in an average reduction in website utilization of over 30% and nearly a 50% reduction in database utilization. This of course has resulted in faster browse times for your customers.
One area that was a bit problematic last year was in the delivery of your email marketing messages. On a normal day messages were delivered in a timely manner. However, we did experience some delays last year in message delivery when dozen of clients sent their messages at the same time. Not this year. Our migration to SendGrid allows for almost an unlimited number of email messages to be delivered. You should not experience any lag or wait times in the delivery of your messages this year, regardless of how many stores decide to send their messages at the same time.
The one problem area has been Store Manager. Store Manager has been sluggish and downright unavailable at times. The technical explanation would bore you to tears. However, suffice to say we're aware of the problem and are looking to make some enhancements in the next 30 days to ensure Store Manager is available to you 24 hours a day and much faster this holiday season. Of course even if Store Manager experiences issues or slowdowns, this doesn't mean your customers are having problems with your website, our record there is outstanding at over 99.99% availability.
Date Created: 09/16/12