E-commerce
E-commerce refers to electronic commerce, where products or services are bought and sold over the internet. In web design, it includes the creation of online shops with features such as product catalogs, shopping carts, and payment systems; in hosting, it requires secure and scalable server solutions.
An online shop is technically more demanding than a company website: shopping cart, payment methods, inventory, tax rates, right of withdrawal. Furthermore, every second of loading time costs money directly, because the customer abandons the purchase mid-contract.
Therefore, the demands on the environment are higher. A shop with 4.000 items generates significantly more database work with each request than a site with 30 subpages. While a company website might manage with 512 megabytes of PHP memory, here 2 gigabytes and an object cache are the realistic minimum. And the shopping cart must not be cached, otherwise the next visitor will see different items.
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