Hot Octopuss Website

We have worked for Hot Octopuss for 7 years now, initially, we helped with SEO to drive more organic traffic, this soon morphed into a full-service contract where we planned and managed all their systems and over time rebuilt the website to make it faster and more user-friendly.

The next project was to plan and implement their first ERP system to manage all the website and trade orders, products, stocks, warehousing, production, and distribution. After reviewing the market for a suitable and affordable system that also allowed multiple warehouses across the globe, we set up an ERP from a smallish company called TradeGecko, which has just be brought out by QuickBooks.

The next project was to integrate the Californian Tax rates into the website, so orders shipped from the Californian warehouse to any Californian address had the correct tax charged, did you know sales tax in California is charges at the district level meaning there are over 1700 bands. To help with this we integrated TaxJar which captures all sales and related tax which is automatically submitted to the tax service keeping Hot Octopuss on the right side of the IRS.

Over the first 5 years Hot Octopuss has grown from 60K per year in online sales to 650K 12 months ago, this increase allowed Hot Octopuss to plan the next expansion.

To grow to the next level, we needed to look at the website hosting to make the website could handle the increase in traffic and sales, our new partnership with a dedicated online marketing agency would bring growth targets of 50+% in the first 12 months.

To handle the growing and spikes in traffic the new plans would generate we moved away from a single dedicated server to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. The planned structure was  as follows:

Each area of the above structure provides the resilience we needed.

• CloudFront – Local cache to deliver content from a local AWS data center to improve worldwide website speed.
• Elastic Load Balancer – User to evenly spread the load across virtual servers
• New Relic – Copy of the website to be used in autoscaling.
• S3 Bucket – This holds all the website static files so they can be delivered to the visitors without adding additional load to the servers.
• Autoscaling – When the load on the live server exceeds 70% a new server is deployed automatically and added to the load balancer reducing the overall load and maintainer the website’s speed and availability to customers. Once the load reduces the additional servers will be dropped.
• RDS – these are the databases that hold the dynamic website information, orders, etc. we have multiple mirrors databases so if one should fail the websites will still function.
• Availability zones – these are different AWS datacentres so if one should go offline the website will continue to run and auto-scale in the second datacentre as needed.

In the last 12 months, Hot Octopuss has seen substantial growth in terms of traffic and Sales

Traffic:

And with a continued focus on driving traffic and website improvements, we have seen growth month on month.