Sales events offer an exciting opportunity for eCommerce businesses to boost revenue and engage with the customer base, but they also come with their fair share of challenges. Imagine that during peak traffic of your much-anticipated promotional sale, your website is experiencing downtime. Frustration mounts as potential customers click away…

This case study is an example of how prompt reaction from a Support team can save the day. In this case, quickly locating and fixing the issue related to discount rules configuration was crucial to whether the client’s promo sales event became a success or resulted in missed opportunities and lost revenue.

Case study: Midnight debugging

Our client launched a big marketing campaign on a Friday. Traffic to the site significantly increased in a short time, which led to a complete website failure—no number of restarts were able to bring it back.

Here’s scandiweb’s Service Cloud approach for a quick fix that generated $500,000 more in sales for our client:

1. Find label misconfiguration rules that fetch items in loops 
2. Disable these rules → the site is back up
3. Reconfigure rules and apply them without issues.

Configuration of discount rules

When configuring Labels, Catalog, or Cart rules, merchants can easily configure them in a non-performance-oriented manner. The case we encountered with our client was caused by the client wanting to apply labels for the whole catalog, except for 5 products—to do so, they selected all brands since those 5 items had no brands assigned to them.

This is what crashed the system. Instead, we reconfigured rules to exclude specific SKUs.

As a result, discount rules were applied within 2-3 minutes versus ~1 hour of downtime. 

Recommendations for discount rules

scandiweb’s Service Cloud experts do not recommend merchants enable Catalog/Cart rules on the morning of the sales day. Our experience shows that the most hassle-free sales happen when merchants pre-test all rules on staging and then apply them in the evening one day earlier without an SMS/email notification.

For high-load projects, the system has time to perform overnight reindexes and enter sale-day ready. If any problems occur with the rule setup or frontend, they can be addressed before high-load traffic is already on the frontend. 

Remember to always think about how you define discount rules in a way that requires the system to make as few selects as possible.

Think ahead with ReadyMage

ReadyMage is a dedicated managed Magento (Adobe Commerce) hosting provider powered by scandiweb—it has auto-scalable AWS infrastructure you can set up with one click. On top of it, ReadyMage team will ask about your upcoming sales calendar and offer to pre-reserve bigger server resources in advance to be 100% safe on the sales day.

Managed hosting on ReadyMage means optimized performance, security, and scalability for eCommerce businesses looking for a specialized hosting provider. ReadyMage is tailored for Magento 2, Hyvä, ScandiPWA, and pre-configured Magento 2 deployments with progressive web apps.

Need urgent help with your eCommerce store? Connect with scandiweb Service Cloud and have a reliable team you can call to rescue your website 24/7!

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