Web and app performance is high stakes for e-commerce all year

Every year around this time, companies start to tell (or be told) cautionary tales about the e-commerce ghosts of Black Fridays past. Here we mean recounting the calamitous failures of major online retailers, essentially falling short of a good customer experience or being completely unable to deliver website content at their biggest revenue-making moment of the year. And without fail, this pattern is repeated annually – both the cautionary pleas to take action against such catastrophes and the retailers who have somehow declined to take heed.

This isn’t such a different entreaty. We do think you should strengthen your reserves and deploy some robust high availability tactics and extra capacity at these key junctures in your sales year. However we don’t believe that it’s something that’s limited to Black Friday and the so-called Cyber 5 (the days surrounding the formerly almighty Black Friday itself). E-commerce is a fact of global daily life globally. Anomalous, enormous online shopping events like the Cyber 5 and China’s Singles Day may dwarf every other time of the year… but the thing is…

• Sudden, unexpected demand can shut your site down without warning.
  
• More people than ever are shopping online for everything from everyday basics like groceries and food deliveries to home renovation materials, from dream vacations to their Mother’s Day gifts and flowers - it is a part of everyday life, not just a once-a-year event.
• Small to medium-sized retailers are moving online and looking for ways to create a niche/competitive advantage against major big box stores and e-commerce behemoths – and these businesses (maybe you’re one of them) may need help in understanding how to prepare for even a moderate flood of traffic and how they might use personalization and need technology to enable high-performance with personalization.
• The demand for – and technical ability to deliver - a fast, seamless, secure, cross-device, personalized shopping experience is driving competition.

There are, in short, a lot of reasons why e-commerce performance is high stakes all the time, and not just for Christmas.

Download our latest e-book – an e-commerce performance survival guide – for practical advice on preparing for the era of ubiquitous, everyday online shopping.