Many of our customers opt not to use our integrated SureDone storefront but instead select an e-commerce website solution such as BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento or others.
SureDone has developed extensive support for many different systems, but we want to make sure it's clear that we are often limited by the capabilities, settings or plan levels of these different applications. When we're limited, we do our best to maximize the amount of information we send, and we often put "tuning" controls into the SureDone settings which allow you to increase or decrease the rate at which we send information to these channels.
BigCommerce
If you are not on the BigCommerce enterprise plan, BigCommerce limits the number of updates and the speed of the updates we can make to their system. This is on a per-customer, per-store basis.
Every time we send a new listing or a complete listing update to BigCommerce, we use approximately 5 "calls" to BigCommerce. One call, for example, may be to create the product. Another one is to add pictures. Another one may be to add inventory levels. BigCommerce has different places we need to send information so we have to break things down this way.
The BigCommerce Pro plan allows for 60,000 calls per hour, with up to 450 calls every 30 seconds. If we're creating new products and using about 5 calls for each product, this means that we can create around 10,000 new products per hour on BigCommerce. If you have a catalog of 500,000 products, this means it may take us 2-3 days to upload your entire catalog. And this goes for any time that we touch BigCommerce - creating products, updating products, inventory updates and more. Once again - this is a limitation placed on us by BigCommerce (see here).
The BigCommerce Enterprise plan allows for unlimited API calls with up to 7,000,000 calls every 30 seconds.
For large catalogs, we recommend being on the Enterprise plan. For smaller catalogs, we do not recommend the Pro plan. We do not recommend any plans below the Pro plan.
Please go here to see further information on BigCommerce limits.
Shopify
Like BigCommerce, Shopify rate limits all users on how much information can be sent over a time period.
For a standard Shopify account, they limit connections to 2 requests per second. For Shopify Plus, this is raised to 4 requests per second. However, they will allow us to fill a "bucket" with up to 40 requests (and this bucket reduces by 2 requests per second). We understand this may be a bit confusing. There's more information on Shopify's API site here.
Magento
There are two primary versions of Magento that SureDone supports - 1.9.x and 2.x.
Magento doesn't rate limit what we send to it. However, depending on the capabilities of your Magento server, you may see errors if you don't use the settings within SureDone to limit how much we send at one time.
By default, SureDone will send as much information to Magento as fast as our system can process it. And we usually will make simultaneous/parallel connections to the Magento server at the same time. Depending on how powerful your server is, this may or may not overwhelm it. In practice, we've found that Magento 2.x can handle more requests than a Magento 1.9.x server can.
However, if you see symptoms like your server becoming unresponsive, server unavailable or similar messages in your SureDone logs or errors in your Magento logs, you may need to decrease the speed at which SureDone sends information to the Magento server. These settings can be found in the Magento configuration within SureDone.
While Magento Community Edition is free, you need to ensure you size your server or servers accordingly and research best practices on optimizing your server speed and capacity. Out of the box there is very little optimization. And, depending on the volatility of your data and the number of orders you receive, you may even need to set up several servers in a cluster to support your load. The software is free, but the infrastructure can be expensive.
SureDone support members are not experts on tuning or sizing Magento servers. We recommend that you contract with one of the thousands of Magento consultants in the world in order to both size and optimize your Magento setup.
