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December 1, 2017
2 min read time

Beware of what the royals wear

Alexandra Lehner
  • e-commerce
  • scalability
  • Performance
  • Varnish Plus Cloud
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    It happened again.

    The ‘royal fashion trend effect’ crashed yet another site on 27th November, 2016, as the engagement announcement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle went public, resulting in a flood of shoppers attempting to buy the stylish coat which the princess-to-be was wearing as images went live.

    The hype for this coat “prompted the brand's website to crash within seconds of the images going live” (Harper Bazaar, 2017). 

    This is not entirely new - interestingly, the royal fashion trend seems to have caused more than one website to go down over the past couple of years.

    “Reiss website crashes as shoppers rush to buy Kate's dress: The Reiss dress worn by the Duchess of Cambridge during the Obamas' visit has sparked a fashion frenzy. “(The Telegraph, 2011)

    “Kate Middleton wears a dress, crashes another website” (Fashionista, 2015)

    “Indian Designer Anita Dongre’s Website Crashed After Kate Middleton Wore Dress” (The Wall Street Journal, 2016)

    Most public figures and the British princesses in particular hold an undisputable power over the next fashion trends. These examples of unexpected traffic flooding e-commerce sites should give all carriers of fashion brands a good reason to ensure that their websites are ready to handle any number of site visitors. Royalties just might happen to wear their brand, and if they do, you certainly want to be ready and able to handle that surge in sales.

     

    Scale up your web performance

    Although you can predict a larger sales event, like Black Friday for example, it is impossible to estimate how large the web traffic will actually be. With the existing flexible solutions available on cloud platforms that allow you to scale your website up or down, you should be covered and be able to serve - and sell - your products to a large number of visitors.

    Take Varnish Plus for example, which is designed for enterprises that want to combine performance and scalability on virtual servers and have it up and running in a few minutes. Several large e-commerce sites rely on Varnish Plus for optimal performance and scalability, either in the cloud or on-premise.

    This is just one way to make sure to stay ahead of the game of the next royal fashion effect!