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.

Ahead of this year’s Amazon Prime Day, moved this year to October 13 and 14, 2020, and other major online shopping days, such as Singles Day and the Cyber Five weekend in late November, it’s worth examining both e-commerce best practices for big shopping periods and how much e-commerce has changed since last year.

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

As the Covid-19 crisis started ramping up, and lockdowns became inevitable, e-commerce sites were among the first to take a hit. This was especially true for e-commerce retailers providing essential services, such as online grocery shopping and delivery. Consumers rushed to these sites to start stockpiling, and even as lockdowns have eased, shopping habits have changed permanently. Some examples: