As a competition business, you’ll need to prioritise scalability.
That’s the first — and main — thing you need to know: competition scalability is key. Your business needs to be able to grow as you do and to handle varied demand.
Your business’s ‘scalability’ is its ability to grow and develop, technically and financially, without being tripped up by its own infrastructure and management.
In other words: can it grow as your business does, or will your website keep crashing when people visit it?
It’s an important feature. It reflects your business’s ability to handle its own success.
Scalability comes from a few key areas:
Competition businesses are a bit different to other ecommerce sites.
They’re run with more sporadic demand. By their nature, there’ll be lower periods of demand and higher periods, depending on prize draw dates, and the time of year (seasonality is a big feature in the competition industry).
Some competitions will soar; they need to have the potential to sell HUNDREDS (if not millions!) of tickets without crashing under traffic strain. Others might only sell a few tickets here and there. Some competitions are small, naturally – little prizes, instant wins, all that fun stuff.
Your website has to be able to meet the demands of both kinds of competition.
The competition business is growing and changing. It’s an increasingly saturated market because everyone’s realised how lucrative it is.
That means that competition websites also need to grow and change, to keep up and remain competitive.
If your competitors (boooo!) have websites that are more flexible than yours, or can handle greater strain and more ticket purchases than yours… Well, it’s not the most professional look.
Scale is important because if your website is consistently down, glitchy, or confusing, it causes mistrust.
But the problem is that competition sites already struggle with a bit of mistrust. One way that competition businesses combat this is to make sure their website looks as slick and professional as possible. After all, scammers don’t put time and effort into making their site a comfortable, exciting experience.
That means that scalability is very much at the heart of how you build trust and community around your competition brand. It’s proactive: if your site is scalable when you start, you won’t run into problems further down the road (and neither will your customers!)
Being able to scale is one thing. Being able to scale well is another altogether.
It’s important to think about scalability in the early days of your competition site, if possible. That’s because, if you have to scale your site later, and in a rush because your page keeps crashing, you’ll run into some technical issues.
For example, landing pages might fail, checkout links might corrupt, and then payments get confusing. That’s when people get a bit cross.
You should build scalability into your site as its foundation, rather than adding it later, as a bit of troubleshooting.
You need to choose a web hosting provider who knows competitions. They should understand the nuances of the industry, and the different demands placed on a competition website as opposed to a regular ecommerce site.
You’ll also need to partner with someone who understands the bigger picture of the competition industry, and what that means for a business like yours.
Experience in the industry shows you certain things, like what the different seasons of the year mean for scalability, and why Return on Investment (ROI) isn’t always the neatest metric to track for competitions… (You’ll have to get in touch to find out, but, SPOILER ALERT, it’s to do with trust…)
Nevermind; you’ll enjoy it!
At Zap, we offer web hosting solutions which were built with competition businesses in mind. We can also support you with marketing so that you can get a better understanding of where those traffic spikes are coming from.
If there’s something scalable in your neighbourhood, who you gonna call?
(Us!)
