Smith Brothers Farms: handling 10,000 daily orders efficiently

Challenge

Smith Brothers Farms was established in 1920 in the state of Washington. The farm provides its customers with dairy, and baked goods. There are over 52K active customers who receive products weekly.

The company's previous site was outdated, besides, there was no mobile friendly platform while the majority of the customers use their smartphones to place orders. Customer experience had to be improved.

The main requirements to the new site included:

• A membership-based store
• The checkout simply means registering for the service with the products customer desires for the first delivery
• Customers of certain geo-location are only allowed for the membership
• Customers should be able to skip future deliveries
• Recurring payment processing for USAePay
• Orders processing takes place between the hours of 6PM – 9 PM, weekdays
• There are approximately 10K orders per day that must be generated and fulfilled within this timeframe
• Performance is a critical factor as this is a high-traffic website

Solution

Irvine met the requirements by using some of the out-of-the-box functionality, such as ACL, product and category management, customer registration, caching, as well as by customizing certain features:

• Standing order – wish lists were utilized in order to reserve a list of products to be delivered weekly/bi-weekly. Functionality was also extended to incorporate the additionally requested features
• Extended caching – more caching was added to improve performance
• Email processing was extracted out of nopCommerce. 10K+ email daily would impact the performance in a great deal. Irvine created a console app that handles all email processing
• Processing 10,000 orders with a small timeframe was not possible or reliable from out-of-the-box features. It would've taken the entire time or went over considering it’d take about 1-2 seconds to process one order through nopCommerce. Irvine decided to make the use of CLR (Common Language Runtime) and extracted the elements needed to process an order from nopCommerce into a project which created a single DLL. We used SQL stored procedures and scheduled jobs to run at 6PM. The 10,000 orders are now processed within few minutes

Mobile version of the store was also created. The developers took advantage of responsive design and provided additional UX adjustments to meet the customer’s requirements.

Result

The new site benefited the company in many ways.

Having a mobile friendly platform played a great role in improving customer experience. Now the company has 30-40 new members daily.

The site performance has improved greatly. The 10,000 orders are now processed within just a few minutes.

“We built and implemented the store in such a way to be able to handle more traffic without jeopardizing the performance.”

- explains Cory Mekanik, CEO at Irvine Software Company.

About the developer: Irvine Software Company is a premier technology consulting firm specializing in web and application development, providing solutions to small businesses across the globe.