How Paradigm PCs cut an 8-hour WooCommerce import to 1 minute
Paradigm PCs has sold computer hardware in New Zealand since 1998. With around 50,000 products fed by a multi-supplier pricing engine, their daily WooCommerce update used to take up to 8 hours on WP All Import. On Super Speedy Imports, the same daily update now runs in about a minute, so now they run their stock, prices and products updates hourly.
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The business
Paradigm PCs (pp.co.nz) is a New Zealand retailer selling computer systems, components, peripherals, software and other electronics. The owner has run it for 28 years, since 1998, and the catalogue sits at roughly 50,000 items.
What they import
The pricing operation behind the store is quite sophisticated. Paradigm PCs buys from multiple suppliers, and many of those suppliers carry the same products. A local database gathers every supplier’s daily price feed, works out which supplier is cheapest and in stock, and from that sets the stock level and price for each product. A second database holds the product information. Together the two produce the files that are pushed out to WooCommerce, Google Merchant, PriceSpy and PCPartPicker.
In other words, this is a daily, price-comparison-grade pipeline. Loading this data into Google Merchant, PriceSpy and PC Part Picker was easy enough but the last step, getting all of that into WooCommerce, is where the bottleneck lived.
The problem: the import tool was setting the ceiling and killing the server
On WP All Import, imports ran at roughly 1,200 to 1,400 products an hour. At that rate, a full 56,000-item update would have taken the best part of two days. So the catalogue and the daily routine were built around that limit rather than around what the business wanted to do. As the owner put it:
these files were designed around WPAI because of its slowness.
That is the hidden cost of a slow import tool. You stop asking how big or how fresh the store could be, and start working within what the import can finish overnight.
To cope with how slow WP All Import is, Paradigm PCs configured their imports into two files, both extracted from their MS Access databases – product updates and new products. This reduced the import file size from 56,000 items down to circa 10,000 items which gave their server a chance to process the new and updated items overnight, but no-one should be forced to take such drastic custom measures for product updates.
With these 2 import files (this 2-file design forced upon them by the slowness of WP All Import) the overnight imports were still taking between 4 hours and 8+ hours. Bearing in mind that while WP All Import is running, your CPUs and disks are maxed out and *will* affect conversion rates on your site, this top-end 8 hour time was limiting the size of their business.
They chose the maximum size of their business based on the maximum amount of time their website could effectively be offline while updating prices – i.e. 8 hours overnight in New Zealand while most people are sleeping.
The switch – how Super Speedy Imports eliminated their ceiling
Paradigm PCs moved the WooCommerce import to Super Speedy Imports, our SQL-first import engine. Setup was straightforward:
It was easy to set up once I understood everything. There were some WordPress quirks I had to get around, but with your help I sorted them fairly quickly.
The first run made the point on its own: “WOW that was fast.” … “This is a game changer.”
The result: about a minute, not 8 hours
The Super Speedy Imports run now completes in about a minute. A full daily refresh (both updates and new products), including a Super Speedy Search index rebuild, takes about 10 minutes in total.
With the import no longer the constraint, Paradigm PCs is now rebuilding a 20-year-old database so the catalogue can grow, with plans to add around 100,000 more items:
I can add another 100,000 items to our website!
Summary
When the import stops being the bottleneck, the catalogue can finally grow to what the business is capable of. For Paradigm PCs, a daily multi-supplier pricing pipeline that once took the entire 8 hour overnight window to load into WooCommerce now arrives in seconds, and a business that shaped itself around a slow tool for years is planning to double its range.
On top of this, their prices and stock levels are far more accurate now – rather than updating their prices only overnight due to their previous import tools slowness, they can now update as often as their source database updates and have far more accurate pricing and far more accurate stock levels which only improves customer satisfaction!
Slow imports quietly cap your store’s potential while frustrating you that you didn’t choose another platform for your store. Super Speedy Imports is up to 1200x+ faster than WP All Import – see the WP All Import vs Super Speedy Imports benchmarks or check our pricing for Super Speedy Imports.
