Unlike previous years, Amazon Prime Day 2020 didn’t see any major technical glitches or outages. Apart from occasional page load timeouts and slow performance at peak times, the online shopping experience was reportedly smooth. More generally across the e-commerce sector, trends emerged to show and counter the influence of Amazon Prime Day: non-Amazon e-commerce sites offering promotions during Prime Day saw up to four-times-higher traffic than normal compared with sites that offered no promotions, and comparison shopping became the norm rather than the exception.

If you were one of the millions attempting to pre-order the sought-after PlayStation 5 and failed -- you weren’t alone. 

E-commerce is poised to change in the near future, and while many predictions herald the coming of ubiquitous VR/AR and voice shopping, some of the changes are likely to be more fundamental and, at least at first, almost invisible. 

Getting online shoppers to turn into active purchasers is a process. One of the often overlooked parts of making the customer journey flow is the technology powering e-commerce performance. Consider everything from speeding up page load times to ensuring that sites and apps remain available even during traffic peaks. Or updating inventory availability and product information and serving personalized recommendations and content to individual users. How can these challenges be tackled to ensure e-commerce success for retailers and smooth user experiences that make customers want to return?