By Jemma Ferguson, Head of Project Delivery, and 

Matthew Briggs, General Manager of CommerceOps

It’s the WrestleMania of retail; the main event of industry. The barometer of a brand’s yearly success heavily depends on fourth quarter performance.

There’s an avalanche of data that pinpoints the importance of the holiday season. This includes shoppers spending a record $258 billion online during the 2025 holiday season, up 6.8% year over year, according to Adobe.

25 days in the season saw more than $4 billion in online spend, up from 18 days in 2024.

Cyber Monday alone drove $14.25 billion.

With so much riding on this part of the year, businesses need to be well-equipped to handle spikes in traffic and order volumes.

The risks are changing too.

Across our CommerceOps clients, we’re seeing three trends shaping peak trading this year: more sophisticated bot attacks, a rise in order and checkout failures, and hidden friction in customer journeys that quietly erodes conversion.

To help you prepare the groundwork, Tryzens’ experts lay out their strategic insight into making peak season a success.

Preparing for peak

1. Testing 

When gearing up for peak, rigorously test your content and promotional plans on both test environments and in production, well in advance.

You don’t want to roll out untested strategies on Black Friday – that is not the time for experimentation.

For digital commerce stores on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, we recommend using staging previews and creating a staff–specific customer group to test in production.

For those on Adobe Commerce, create all promotions in staging and verify they work before repeating the same steps on production. 

For those on Shopify, familiarize yourself with Shopify Flow so you can schedule content. If you have a pre-production environment, test there first to make sure no issues reach production. Where a pre-production environment is not available, make all changes in a new theme so that you can test thoroughly. When ready, publish it manually or using Flow. 

Promotions deserve particular attention this year.

We’ve seen a rise in order failures caused by incorrectly configured promotions. Confirm and test every promotion you plan to run at checkout before peak, then test each one again once it goes live.

In terms of media, be conscious of the size and impact of new content such as large images, GIFs, and videos. They all add weight to a page and can slow down the user experience. When updating media assets, compress wherever possible and test site speed to avoid bloating your website.

To optimize stock management, review your inventory and work out whether there are likely scenarios of overselling products or underperforming products. Are these levels of risk you’re willing to take as a business? 

2. Traffic predictions

Traffic predictions are a critical component of successful peak season preparations for retailers. To facilitate this, work with your hosting provider to ensure that the right server and cloud capacity provisions are in place.

Carry out load testing to prove that the system can cope with the predicted traffic and that the load doesn’t overwhelm it. In digital commerce, speed cannot be overstated.

Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time. If you’re well prepared for traffic, your site is more likely to handle spikes in user activity smoothly and quickly. 

For those on a SaaS platform, make sure to inform your provider of your expected traffic levels. Some providers will need to make adjustments to ensure the increased load can be accommodated – adopt an ‘earlier the better’ approach to this!

3. Security 

Safeguard your digital storefront by reviewing your security processes.

Cyberattacks tend to be more common during peak periods. Bad actors have more traffic to hide in while resources are stretched to respond to threats.

Bots now make up more than 53% of all web traffic, and AI-driven bot attacks grew 12.5 times in a year, according to Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report.

Across our CommerceOps clients, we’re seeing the same pattern: more attacks on storefronts, and attacks that are harder to pinpoint and remediate. The impact ranges from degraded page speed to full outages, when a platform can’t handle the load or a specific part of the storefront code falls over.

You can’t stop a bot attack attempt. But you can limit its impact:

• • Review web application firewall (WAF) settings. Make sure they give you the right level of protection. We recommend these settings to clients and apply them on their behalf.

• • Add CAPTCHA to key pages and known weak spots. It acts as a deterrent to attackers.

• • Get real-time visibility of your traffic profile. You need to know an attack is happening while you can still respond. We do this through WAF monitoring, error page monitoring, and account takeover monitoring.

Alongside real-time visibility, have a known, documented process in place for responding to anything suspicious that arises.

Retailers should also review their wider security stance to ensure their storefront has no vulnerabilities. Penetration testing is the best way to achieve this.

In addition, consider automated security code tests as a one-off for peak before including them as part of an ongoing delivery process.

Ensure that a role-based access control (RBAC) policy is in place for the backend portal of the storefront, with all users having the correct level of permission according to their role. This isn’t just a consideration for peak season; it’s best practice for business as usual but becomes even more important during the holiday season.

Lock down changes to fraud settings during peak. Changes to fraud rules, whether made by your team or by your payment service provider (PSP), are one of the causes of order failures we see. So confirm any changes before peak begins.

Finally, retailers should have a content security policy (CSP) implemented that governs the flow of data to and from the storefront – defining a set of rules that specify which sources of content are safe.

It’s the only way you can be sure that data is only being shared with known and trusted third parties.

4. Know your weak points 

Be proactive in identifying and addressing potentially vulnerable areas to ensure your business is well-prepared to handle increased demand and visitor traffic.

Review code to understand where there are potential areas that could collapse during peak traffic. Again, load testing is the best way to understand this, using an accurate load profile of your real customer traffic.

Ask yourself whether these are areas you are willing to have problems with or whether they need resolving.

In particular, check your caching strategy. Effective caching can significantly improve your website’s performance during high traffic periods.

When proper caching is in place, a large portion of incoming traffic will be served from cached resources, reducing the load on lower levels of your technology stack and improving page loading times and the overall user experience.

5. Third-party partner support

Review your key third-party contact list and understand their support processes during peak season.

It’s key to understand if there are any changes to the support provided by third-party suppliers during peak season so that you know how to engage them should the need arise.

Gain a clear understanding of how your third-party partners will be monitoring your website (whether it be the storefront or backend) and establish a well-defined plan for communicating any deviations from expected behavior as well as the process for responding to these changes.

During peak season

In the heart of peak season, real-time observability gives retailers the ability to respond to unforeseen challenges quickly, while a well-paced email strategy helps manage traffic surges.

Both help maintain a smooth and positive customer experience throughout the holiday period.

1. Observability

Having the right level of monitoring in place is critical during peak season.

If you don’t have AI-enabled, automated monitoring in place, adjust thresholds to reflect predicted traffic and order levels. This ensures potential friction points are not missed, for example, a social media campaign incorrectly sending customers to error pages.

Also, make sure you’re tracking backend activity, such as CPU usage, job queues, server status, and integrations points.

Monitoring should cover all key areas of the purchase journey and identify anomalies. The key metrics around operational and trading performance should all be readily available during peak, so you can report on performance and respond to any situation that arises.

If you have a digital commerce partner, confirm whether they provide enhanced support during peak. At Tryzens, this comes through CommerceOps, our always-on service that analyzes over 200 real-time data points across trade, performance, integrations, security, and accessibility.  

Global brands including Sweaty Betty and Dune London use CommerceOps to keep their storefronts safeguarded and performing at all times.

2. Order monitoring

Order-related issues are rising.

Across our clients, we’ve seen order failures caused by malicious activity, incorrect promotion setup, and changes to fraud rules made by the brand or its PSP.

Real-time, order-level monitoring lets you spot a spike in order failures as it happens, rather than in the next day’s trading report.

Combined with the promotion testing and fraud setting lockdown covered above, it closes the most common gaps. We build this monitoring into our CommerceOps dashboards for clients.

3. Customer journey friction

Brands need to know where customers leave their journey, and whether errors or friction caused them to leave.

During peak, you need to know this in real time and act on it quickly. Frontend error monitoring identifies the errors customers experience, shows whether those errors cause them to bounce or abandon, and points to the fix.

This year, fixes identified through our frontend error monitoring reduced errors seen by customers at login by 22% and resolved errors that were preventing 15% of customers from checking out.

Observability also proves its value when nothing is broken.

Several times this year, clients have come to us concerned that missed trading targets pointed to a problem with the site.

In each case, our monitoring showed the site was performing as expected. Ruling out technical issues quickly meant those teams could focus on what was really affecting trade.

For the customer experience side of peak, read why peak conversion drops.

4. Staggered email campaigns

If you expect a major uplift in traffic following an email send, make sure your key pages are cached before the email goes out.

To limit surges in traffic, consider staggering emails to flatten the peak of people coming to the site.

Add a layer of personalization by segmenting your email list and tailoring messages to specific customer groups.

Personalized emails can also be spread out across peak season, flattening traffic spikes further while delivering better customer experiences.

Optimize your peak season stragety

Are you prepared for the surge in traffic across all your digital touchpoints?

If you’re gearing up for peak season, connect with Tryzens. We implement and optimize peak season strategies for major international brands and retailers, preparing them for retail’s main event of the year.

We monitor a wide range of metrics and activities around the clock, looking for changes in performance against leading KPIs to spot issues quickly and resolve them before they become problems.

Our peak trade enhanced services include load testing, proactive maintenance and heightened support, and client team augmentation.