Black Friday Checklist: 5 points to help you optimizing your ecommerce

Black Friday 2020 will be the first big online sales of the COVID-19 era. But, there is a notarial difference, in respect 2019. Since march 20 many websites have experienced themselves what high traffic means . And some of them were proved not being prepared for that.

We can indeed say that the shift to online caused by the virus had benefited those retailers with the slickest e-commerce operations and who managed to cope with the shift in demand.

 

In terms of demand for Black Friday 2020, the numbers speak for themselves. An estimation of  91% of customers in the United Kingdom will not be shopping in stores this year. Instead, they will be going more online, accelerated by the pandemic. This is a heavy increase from 2019, where 56% only shopped online on Black Friday.

 

So, having your ecommerce platform ready is this time mandatory. Our team of experts want to support you on that so we have combined 5 key factors to take into account in order to prepare your ecommerce for a successful Black Friday sales 2020.

 

Re-evaluate your expectations on the volume of sales you are forecasting

It is crucial to estimate the number of sales you are expecting for Black Friday 2020 and the possible revenue. Take into account your approach to offers, discounts and pricing in general, and prepare your ecommerce platform to support those changes. 

Last but not least, be aware of the volume of traffic your platform can hold. If your ecommerce infrastructure is not strong enough for your forecasting, define the enhancements you need to make beforehand.

 

Stress test for platform performances and capacity tailoring

Once you’ve made the enhancements to your ecommerce infrastructure it is important to test them. We recommend to analice how the site behaves under pressure and establishing where the limitations are. Also, how is the user experience when the infrastructure is under heavy load. This analysis can help us to point out the strengths and weaknesses of the infrastructure. With these conclusions as a base, we can plan better the enhancements needed for the expected results.

 

Proactive monitoring to assure issue detection and problem forecast

During Black Friday it is critical that your platform can manage the increase of traffic and orders and the only way to do this is having a complete real-time overview of your system. To be able to do so, there are multiple tools and software available in the market but you need the necessary experience to operate with them at their max: granting full observability and predicting possible problems.

 

Real time service check to grant a uninterrupted purchase flow 

There are multiple services running contemporary in a platform: from order management to payment verification passing through interactive banners and marketing campaigns. During Black Friday every of these services is under stress; so, are you sure they can handle the effort? At Orienteed, and thanks to our extended experience we can monitor and manage even the one service you forgot you were using.

 

Smart triage and support flow to guarantee quick issue fixing

Acting in a timely fashion is critical during Black Friday, every misservice or, even worse outage not only costs you in revenue but also in confidence from your customers. For this reason it is mandatory to have a support team that can isolate, identify and correctly manage all the issues that may arise. 

Conclusions

From our analysis, we could establish the following conclusions that may put in perspective how important it can be to make improvements in your current infrastructure.

 

1. Shopping journey starts online: 87% of shopping journeys start online now. Under the current circumstances created by COVID-19,  there is a massive opportunity in how retailers can invest in optimising their online to instore relationships. 
2. Data and more data: Everything can be measured if you have in place the right tools. With data, it is possible to make the right decisions in order to improve any KPI you could imagine.
3. You lose customers if your site is not responding well: Google estimates that 40% of consumers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Your website should load fast, allowing customers to view products and switch from product to product without any downtime. Long waits for pages to load often cause customers to abandon their carts to find websites that function better.