So you were wondering about the smoking gun thing and wanted to be wowed. Well this cache story should charm you “know it all’s”. Normally the world of e-commerce is myriad of product postings, image cropping, detail descriptions, and price changes, but sometimes clients get blind-sided by things they never dreamed of and tech support cannot help you because they haven’t experienced the solution. So why would an online marketing firm know the solution? Simple….

The tech support on various web hosting companies is full of newbies that only know what they know. They sweat bullets trying to figure out what you messed up on the back-end most of the time. But synthesizing information is not their strong suit. They almost always have to have the error replicated before their very eyes to understand the problem. Business owners just don’t have the time or patience to hold their hand and teach them how to handle customer problems. Sometimes they just say,”Sorry dude. Can’t figure this one out. Is there anything else I can give you excellent customer service on today?”

That’s when business owners lose it! That’s when they call the SEO guys for help. Why? Because they don’t want to call the developers in Russia because that would cost too much. $175 an hour is too much for someone that has $100K invested in their business. Short sighted? Yes. So they want to the SEO guys to handle it for free. Mularky? Yes. But here we go….listen up.

I had a client call me because their website crashed. They didn’t know why it crashed. They had not paid their previous tech support guy’s bill, so they couldn’t call them, so they called the host. The host tech support looked at the problem and they saw files being replicated so they thought it was a virus.

Even after the anti-virus add-on had been installed, the problem persisted. So it wasn’t a virus. The tech guys at the host were dumbfounded. That’s when the CEO called me and wanted help.

The problem lies in the fact that e-commerce sites get comparison shopped all day by competitors. Well, if your website internally caches that page for that visitor that creates a file. If that happens hundreds or thousands of times it can approach a limit set by the host company. Yes a limit. Buckle up people.

If you’re on a shared server and the host company puts a limit on the number of files you can have in your directories, then there is a limit to the number of cache files you can have at any time. So if you do not clear your caches regularly, your website will crash. Yes. You heard me right. Crash.

Some CEO’s like to save money and don’t like to upgrade their platforms, so they don’t have the ability to do certain tasks because they are not on a macro menu. Only the developers can do those tasks, like a scheduled script. So being cheap kills some e-commerce companies in the long run. They never see it coming. They move from one host to another. Give up dedicated server. Get stuck with a file limit, then BOOM. Help, help, help!!

So I talked to the developers at 3am. They told me the old version didn’t have a cache clearing option. They wanted to charge for development. Luckily there was an option to modify the logon script to clear caches. This option was left available by developers working on the old versions. So we tried it and it worked. It cleared the caches with every logon. Then we just had to bookmark it for the CEO so by logging on he could clear his own caches daily.

Sound crazy? Yup. Did the SEO expert have to solve the cache problem? Yup. Did it help that the SEO guy had an MBA which covered computer science so connecting the dots was easier? Yup. Why couldn’t the tech support guys figure the cache problem out? Experience and a focus of reducing call times versus solving customer website issues. Want help with your e-commerce SEO? Email Allied Virtual Media.