Why Scaling eCommerce Shouldn’t Mean Crashing eCommerce

Growth is the ultimate goal for any business, but for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), rapid success can often feel like a double-edged sword. While scaling up is exciting, it can also bring unexpected chaos if your tech isn’t ready for the surge. Platforms failing to scale, businesses losing revenue, and customer trust taking a nosedive are common pitfalls. To avoid these, SMBs need robust solutions like StoreConnect’s customer commerce platform.

The Growth Dilemma for SMBs

When entrepreneurs dive into the eCommerce space, they do so with ambition and enthusiasm, ready to take on the global marketplace. But here’s the problem: most eCommerce platforms catering to startups are designed for limited-scale operations. They’re great until they’re not.

The moment SMBs experience a sudden surge in orders, their platform often becomes the bottleneck. These systems were simply not built to handle rapid growth.

Consider the chaos during the 2020 pre-order launches for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox consoles. Major retailers couldn’t handle the simultaneous flood of orders, leading to website crashes and frustrated customers.

More recently, during the 2024 Black Friday sales, a major retailer’s website went offline for hours due to unanticipated traffic. This outage didn’t just result in lost sales—it also damaged their reputation, proving that no amount of friendly apology messages can fully make up for downtime.

The Cost of Downtime

Unscalable eCommerce platforms can lead to catastrophic downtime, and the numbers back this up. The Uptime Institute’s 2024 Annual Outage Analysis Report found that over half (55%) of operators experienced an outage in the past three years, with 18% classified as serious or severe.

Downtime isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it’s a business killer.

When your website goes down, your customers don’t wait—they move on to your competitors.

This is why scalability matters.

One of StoreConnect’s clients saw their typical monthly volume of 3,000 orders explode to 35,000 in just two days during a promotional event. Thanks to the scaling ability of StoreConnect, their online store handled the surge like a champion. No crashes, no slowdowns, just a flawless customer experience. They achieved 20 times their usual monthly revenue without needing pre-scaling or system adjustments.

That’s what a scalable solution looks like.

A Scalable Solution

StoreConnect is built natively on the Salesforce platform, which means it offers SMBs a single source of truth for all operations, not to mention opening up a huge scope for business automation, analytics and AI.

Unlike platforms that rely on third-party servers, StoreConnect integrates directly with Salesforce to ensure seamless data processing and synchronization. Here’s the kicker: the platform operates independently of Salesforce backend operations. So even during high-volume traffic, order processing and customer experiences remain smooth.

Curious how StoreConnect stacks up against Shopify, Commerce Cloud, and other popular platforms? [Check out the comparison chart here.](https://getstoreconnect.com/features/comparison)

Planning for the Future

Scaling isn’t just about having the right technology; it’s about having the right strategy. According to the Startup Genome Report, 74% of startups fail due to premature scaling. SMBs need platforms that evolve with them, not ones they outgrow. Time is money, and with StoreConnect, both are spent wisely.

Welcome to the Era of Customer Commerce

At its core, StoreConnect is about more than just technology. It’s about empowering SMBs to focus on what really matters: their customers. This approach, called Customer Commerce, prioritizes relationships over transactions, helping businesses communicate authentically, build connections, and deliver an experience customers genuinely appreciate.

Technology should make life easier, not harder. If you’re tired of dealing with tools that complicate more than they simplify, it might be time to think differently.

Customer Commerce helps businesses grow, scale, and thrive—without the hassle. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about the tech you use. It’s about the connections you make.

About StoreConnect

StoreConnect empowers SMBs to thrive in the digital commerce era. The Salesforce-native platform combines eCommerce, customer relationship management (CRM), point of sale, and digital marketing into a single, powerful solution.

Awarded Salesforce’s 2021 International Partner Innovation Award for Retail, StoreConnect is committed to transforming how SMBs operate, scale, and succeed. For more information, visit getstoreconnect.com.

References:

1. Hennessey, J. (2022, August 4). Be the goldilocks of scaling your business: Not too fast, not too slow, but. Retrieved January 6, 2023.

2. Why is premature scaling still the biggest startup killer? (n.d.). Retrieved January 6, 2023

3. Uptime Institute’s 2022 outage analysis finds downtime costs and consequences worsening as industry efforts to curb outage frequency fall short. (2022, June 8). Retrieved January 6, 2023.

4. Global Reach. (2020, September 29). The e-commerce console crash. Retrieved January 6, 2023