Admin and widget caching

Caching is an important step in most internet based systems or websites and is used to reduce the amount of data that is needed to be “re-downloaded” for a page or system to run.

We use caching in various placing in our internal systems, the customer Widget on your store and inside the admin where you tweak your program.

Caching on the widget

For the widget, we cache some information for up to 15 minutes such as activity data for a customer – so they might not always see their latest activity information if they’ve just placed an order for example. The same is said about a customers VIP progress.

We also cache the Earn & Redeem items in the widget but this happens on each page load when they access those parts of the app. When the reload the page or move to another page, we will get the updated version of those areas again when they view them.

Any widget styles and text customisations are also cached for up to 15 minutes. So if you make a change to the colour of your widget or the text in a button, it might not be reflected straight away.

What’s not cached

We currently do not cache if your program is live or not, this means that when your turn of your program it should hide the widget right away but sometimes the browser might cache some data that causes it still to be shown for sometime after.

We do not fully cache at the moment, the stamp data a customer has – this means on every page load if they open up the widget we will grab their stamp balance again. In times of high load on our server, we may cache some of this information however.

Caching in the admin

Currently we cache the settings information inside the admin for 5 minutes, or when you make a change.

Caching in the backend systems

We also cache other things inside the admin such as the email previews and the customer POS rewards that they can be given. Customer POS data is cached every hour, so they might not always have the most up to date stamp information in their account.

Important: although you won’t see the changes right away any changes you make will take effect immediately. If you change how many stamps are on a card, or how many stamps someone earns on an activity – you might not see it be reflected in the widget but it will take affect right away.