I have a client with a special need in an ecommerce solution: they need software that can handle literally a million products or more. They’re a reseller of products they get from a variety of sources and every product is, in effect, one of a kind. They may have 10 or 100 or even 1000 copies of a given product but each one is listed independently in their data feeds and each one is listed as a separate product in their catalog. Their customers typically search for a part number and then a listing of matching products is displayed.
So, my question is: what platform would be a good match for this kind of an ecommerce site? They don’t need any bells and whistles. What they need is something industrial strength that can perform quickly with a very large volume of products.
I have consulted our chief architect, and this is what he told me: in any case, what you’ll definitely need is a powerful dedicated server with the load balancer.
And it’s very hard to get something well-optimized and affordable right out of the box.
For example, CS-Cart was tested and optimized for working with 100 000+ products, but we didn’t test it with the higher capacity since clients rarely need this.
A custom, optimized solution based on the ready-made one may cost from USD 4-5k (approximately).
With a million products, you’re going to need to at the very least customize an out-of-the-box solution. I’d recommend contacting a few vendors like Magento, CS-Cart, PinnacleCart, Avactis, AbleCommerce, and Interspire to name a few.
I think you’re looking at spending at least $10,000 or more to ensure (with testing) you can support over 250,000 products. That shouldn’t be a problem for your client though, because if they’re seriously considering this they will be spending a LOT more than that in labor getting the products massaged into the system. I can’t imagine heading up that project… working with a few dozen vendors (and all their different formats of product data) and thousands of products is hard enough!
All ecommerce programs can handle a million products. It’s not like their going to get tired or something. What you want to look for is the most efficiently coded ecommerce program. That way it willn’t bog down at a million.
As you need a good server you also need a well-coded system to perform better with heavy traffic loads. If the database queries are not optimized properly your website would crash on heavy traffic.
