SimplePart October Update Part 1

Part 1 of the October Update for SimplePart from SimplePart CEO Cole Getzler.

Photo Courtesy of Paloma Gomez

During October we peaked at 10.5 million (+22%) daily page requests and saw a total of 1,988,858 (+6.6%) unique human visitors. These visitors placed 10,256 orders (+3%) for a total of $1,290,110 (+1%) in sales. The notable increase in page request throughput is a product of our ongoing infrastructure improvements, which have greatly increased our capacity to service traffic. As we continue our schedule of upgrades, you can expect further increases in throughput and performance system-wide. Page delivery time is critical for end user satisfaction, as well as search engine ranking.

The next round of changes we will be making may require adjustment of your DNS settings. Our overall strategy involves balancing load across multiple datacenters, and across many servers within each datacenter. This helps us handle spikes in demand, as well as tolerate failures of components within the system. We will be contacting each of you to review your DNS settings, and confirm that you are able to take full advantage of this strategy – please expect to hear from us over the next few weeks. We appreciate your help.

I would also like to offer the services of our Market Intelligence team to you as you prepare your forecasts for 2014. Our team can help you analyze your 2013 online parts performance, and present a range of options for increasing sales, managing GP figures and maximizing profits. The services of our analytics team are always available to you free of charge – in many cases, they are able to help double or triple online parts sales, while maintaining (or improving!) GP% and NP$ levels. Please call us - we are happy to help.

This month SimplePart experienced a small outage on the morning of October 25, caused by a firewall failure. This outage lasted around 20 minutes, during which you might have experienced spotty connectivity to your website and Control Panel. I apologize for the inconvenience and trouble. Changes to this area of our infrastructure are ongoing to help reduce the likelihood of outages like this one in the future.