shopping cart software

What is Bandwidth?

A question Volusion merchants often ask our technical support staff is, "What does bandwidth mean exactly and how does it relate to my Volusion store"?

To answer this question, let's take a look at a simple definition of the word bandwidth

Bandwidth
-noun
1. The numerical difference between the upper and lower frequencies of a ban of electromagnetic radiation, especially and assigned range of radio frequencies.
2. The amount of data that can be passed along a communications channel in a given period of time.

The American Heritage Dictionary

Simply put - bandwidth usage comes in the form of any visitor to a website that causes data to be transferred downstream to that visitor. Anytime someone or something visits any website, it uses a certain amount of bandwidth. This can be a customer, a search engine, a security scanning service or, really anything else that could access the site via the World Wide Web.

Here's an illustrated example:

Bob's online store, www.superwidgets.com has been open for only a month. Bob's store averages 5 unique visits to his site per day. Bob's store has many detailed product images as well as graphic elements within its design.

Every time a visitor browses Bob's online store, their web browser downloads any product photo or image within the store that would need to display a web page for the site. This transfer of images as well as other web page content uses bandwidth. Bob of course pays a company to host his online store and they charge him for the amount of bandwidth he uses per month.

The larger these image files are, the more bandwidth each consumes as they are downloaded. Bob has few customers since his store is very new, thus, Bob's store consumes very little bandwidth per month and his hosting fees are very affordable.

However six months later, after a successful advertising campaign, Bob's site is doing a great deal of business. Superwidgets.com has over 2,000 customers and is averaging 500 unique hits per day. Bob's hosting fees are now much more expensive. Since Bob's daily number of unique visitors has increased 100-fold within the past 6 months, the amount of bandwidth being used by his customers is that much greater.

How does this apply to Volusion's E-Commerce Services?

Like any other Internet hosting provider, one of the essential resources Volusion provides on top of an award-winning application and web hosting services is bandwidth.

Each Volusion-based merchant is allotted a certain amount of bandwidth for their store for the course of each 30-day billing cycle. Merchants are obligated to pay for any additional bandwidth usage they may consume beyond the initial amount allotted to them per month. Bandwidth overage charges per billing cycle can be reviewed within the account usage information in each merchant's my.volusion.com account.

There are several tips Volusion-based merchants can use to better control the amount of bandwidth their store uses per month. Having a sudden increase in bandwidth usage due to a spike in customer visits to a merchant's online store is a welcomed problem however, merchants will want to make sure they make effective use of the bandwidth their Volusion plan offers. The following article offers tips and suggestions on how to do this as well as some things online merchants will want to avoid doing to conserve their store's monthly bandwidth use.

Part I - Managing Image Size:

When creating images for your products or for graphic elements within your store, here are a few things to be aware of:

• Choosing the right image type is important. Use image file types that allow file size compression - this keeps the image size minimal without sacrificing quality. Common file types that support compression are .jpg and .gif.
• Avoid using image file types such as .bmp or .tif as they tend to be very large in size.
• You want to have clear, easily viewable images within your site but don't make them too large. A product image appearing within the featured products page at 640x480 resolution is likely too large. It will use up more bandwidth than needed and will clutter up the featured products area of the store front.
• Most image editors such as Adobe Photoshop allow users to choose the quality/compression ratio for when they save their images in formats such as .jpg.
• Instead of saving .jpg files at highest quality (a setting of 12 in Adobe Photoshop), throttle back the quality just a bit. A small loss in quality will be imperceptible on the Web and will lessen the file size of images (in Photoshop, try a quality setting of 8 or 9 instead of 12).
• Having many high-resolution images on a web page will not only use bandwidth but will take time to load - this is especially painful for customers visiting the site using a dial-up Internet connection. In this case, thumbnails are the answer!
• Thumbnails are small, lower-resolution versions of a larger image. They act as place holders or previews of images that visitors can click on if they wish to view the actual image they represent at full size. Their small size allows for quick downloads and minimal usage of bandwidth.
• Volusion's e-commerce system can automatically generate thumbnails for your product images when you load the image into the Product table in the Volusion Admin Page.
• Alternately, Volusion provides the Volusion Thumbnail Generator for users who have vast numbers of products they need to set up in their Volusion store (see the Thumbnail Generator knowledge base article for more information).

Part II - Managing PDF and Other Hosted Files:

Adobe's PDF file type is very useful as a means of providing comprehensive data to store visitors in one, easily downloadable file (e.g. size charts or charts with conversion rates for international customers). These files can sometimes be quite large and will use bandwidth for anyone downloading the file from the Volusion store. One tip to prevent this from becoming a problem is to host the file from a free, 3rd party service such as Scribd.com. Image or file-hosting services such as these provide totally free file hosting on the Internet as well as ways to link those files to web pages or other Web-based services. Since the PDF or file is hosted on a 3rd party service, any bandwidth the file uses will not draw from the merchant's monthly allotment of their Volusion store's bandwidth - potentially reducing costs for the merchant.

Part III - Using Flash Animation and Video:

Many merchants, for eye-catching, marketing and informative purposes have elected to display flash animation within their Volusion store. This can be very useful for merchants in attracting customers' attention, however a downside to hosting Internet video within your Volusion store is that these files can be quite large in size and can use a great deal of bandwidth.

However, just as services like Flickr provide free image hosting on the Web, services like Youtube.com or Google Video provide free video and flash hosting - more free bandwidth! Merchants can host their videos on sites such as Youtube and then embed the video into their Volusion store. Requests for the video itself will go through Volusion but the bandwidth being used in this case will be provided by Youtube, - preventing an unnecessary use of a merchant's store's resources.

Part IV - Administration Page Management:

There is a wealth of web pages, scripts, images and online tools within the Volusion Administration Page that merchants use to manage their online store. Accessing these pages also consumes bandwidth.

Keep in mind that in most cases, online stores have 1, 2 or just a few authorized users who would be visiting the store's administration page on a daily basis. Visiting and interacting with the Volusion store back-end does use bandwidth but the amount is generally far less than the bandwidth usage generated from the storefront. However, here are some things Volusion merchants should keep in mind in regards to bandwidth usage and their Volusion store's Admin Page:

• Making use of the product export functions within Volusion can use considerable amounts of bandwidth if merchants export frequently and if the files exported from Volusion are quite large (e.g. the entire contents of the Product table, containing 50,000 products could be several megabytes in size).
• Exporting large amounts of data from the Volusion store using the Volusion API can also have a significant affect on bandwidth usage - again if this is done frequently and with large sets of data.
• Displaying large amounts of data within the Volusion Admin Page's various table view pages can also use a significant amount of bandwidth if there are many administrators who attend to the site as well as many products hosted within the site.
• Furthermore, if in previous example, choosing to enable many of the product attribute columns to be editable (enabling the yellow, pencil icon at the top of each column) will consume even more bandwidth as all of these functions are resource intensive to the Volusion store.
• Volusion recommends setting the table view pages to display a smaller number of elements at a time (e.g. 100 or 250) as well as only displaying the table elements that are absolutely necessary for site administrators to view (product name, product price, etc.). This will decrease overall load times for portions of the Volusion Admin Page.
• Another tip is to make sure that if merchants wish to edit data within the table view page for any Volusion database table, only enable columns that need to be edited. This will also decrease overall load times for portions of the Volusion Admin Page. Note that any column within the table view that is marked as editable will request the Volusion system to check every element in the column for any changes made - regardless if that column was edited at all.

Part V - Using Social Networking and Web 2.0 Services:

With the rise of social networking services, many merchants have used sites such as Myspace.com and Facebook.comto market their online stores, goods and services. While this can be a useful marketing tactic, it also can pose problems in terms of bandwidth usage for merchants.

Using our original example, Bob from www.superwidgets.com decides to use his MySpace page to market his online store. Bob decides to link some product information as well as product images within his store on MySpace. Bob is likely going to increase his store's page visits however, since the product images he linked to from his MySpace page are hosted within his online store, every visitor to his MySpace page will be downloading those images and thus, using some of his online store's bandwidth. With over 10,000 friends online, this could very easily cost Bob a great deal of money in hosting fees.

A better alternative to the above case would be to copy these product images and host them directly from the MySpace account or through some free, 3rd party service. Bob could also use the Volusion API to generate an export that Bob or his web designer can integrate into MySpace using that service's API. This will allow Bob to host product information, including images on his MySpace page without sacrificing bandwidth. For more information, please view Volusion's API documentation online at devwiki.vlousion.com.

Part VI - What Else You Should Know:

Volusion merchants concerned about their store's bandwidth usage have an excellent repository of information regarding their store's activity - including information of most viewed pages, most frequently downloaded files and more. This can all be found within the Smarter Stats portion of every merchant's account at my.volusion.com. The Smarter Stats page within my.volusion.com is a report, updated in real-time that contains information regarding web server activity in relation to a merchant's Volusion store. For information on how to obtain information regarding your store's bandwidth usage using Smarter Stats, please review this article on how to log into Smarter Stats from within my.volusion.com to gain information on your Volusion store.

Summary:

Volusion merchants can control their online store's bandwidth usage. However, there's no stopping increasing amounts of store bandwidth usage as merchants' online businesses continue to grow in terms of both sales and customer base. If you have taken the time to optimize your Volusion store but notice that, due to increasing sales volume, click-throughs and unique visits that your store continues to consistently accrue monthly bandwidth overages month after month, it may be time to upgrade your account. Upgrading your Volusion plan is a snap - simply log into your account at my.volusion.com and upgrade your plan. For more information on store plans, please visit www.volusion.com. For further inquiries, contact our sales department at sales@volusion.com or call us at 1-800-646-3517.