For online retail companies, downtime is the worst-case scenario. Downtime or traffic slowdowns lead to a number of negative effects: 

In 2021, as the Covid pandemic that pushed e-commerce into the dominant way of shopping, it became clear that existing challenges to e-commerce persist: site availability and speed. The new levels of demand placed on e-commerce platforms and websites challenged their resilience, taxed the patience of consumers, and ultimately changed the way e-commerce companies think about the technology they rely on to power always-on shopping for the nonstop, 24/7 nature of online retail post-Covid.

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.