According to a recent nationwide survey from Guidance, 36% of online shoppers ran into problems with e-commerce sites when buying gifts during this holiday season 2008.

Common problems experienced by people were:

Slow web site : 34%
Crashed web site: 21%
Could not complete purchase: 19%
Site was temporarily down: 16%
Purchase didn’t go through: 10%

Thats a big problem for your e-commerce business

With all the hard work you do to bring in customers to your site who are really willing to make a purchase, these problems could ruin your whole efforts. It ruins not only your branding nut also make you loose money. People have so many choices these days to shop online. Lot of people facing those problems won’t forget these problems, and many of them would find another more stable e-commerce site.

Whats causing it?

It could be for many reasons like:

• Bad coding of your website backend
• Database not indexed properly
• Web Hosting Service can’t handle the load.
• Shopping cart not coded properly.

Not all programmers have enough experience code an efficient site; problems like these got lot to do with the coding as well.

If database is not indexed properly, the site gonna be real slow on update/write/read operations, slowing down your website.

If you are on shared hosting and running a high traffic site, you will get in trouble with speed.

If a cart stores images in the database, people adding lot of products on the cart would cause the database respond slower. Image file size is another issue. Lot of people uses way too many images for each products and loads them all at once; thats probably not the best solution for a busy site.

To avoid situations like this, a site can have to be optimized in different levels:

• database
• shopping cart
• image file sizes
• number of  product images to load on page load.

Its good idea to check the load time on local machine while optimizing the site.