Scalability: Building Your Business for Transactional Growth

When starting a business, most business owners hope to quickly grow. After all, more customers mean more revenue. But if you aren’t prepared, expanding could put your business at risk. Obviously, having enough inventory, staff and equipment is critical to expanding operations. One area that many merchants overlook is processing credit card transactions.

You have to get approval from your bank to process higher volumes and you run the risk of increased chargebacks, a vexing problem for online merchants. How do you prepare your business for expansion? For starters, you have to think about scalability from the beginning. Before you accept your first order, ask yourself “Can I accept double the amount of current sales or triple?” While it usually takes time to build a steady client base, you don’t want to be unprepared should your site get flooded with orders.

When you think about scalability, having the right infrastructure and software from the beginning will enable seamless growth down the road-even if it happens unexpectedly. The right transaction management software allows you to process higher levels of credit card transactions and effectively manage chargeback cycles. The last thing you want is for your website to go down during Black Friday or during the highest buying periods.

Your transaction management system is absolutely critical to successful scalability of your operations, however, at the basic level, your applications have to support the software.

Good design is the foundation of a highly scalable application. At no other point in the life-cycle of an application can a decision have a greater impact on the scalability of an application than during the design phase. Go with a design team that is well-versed in e-commerce platforms.