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. Around 40% of total order volume for the year occurs in Q4. Nine-in-ten of the best-selling days for ecommerce retailers come in the same quarter. And one-third of all retail sales happen during the holiday season.

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

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, ensure rigorous testing of 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 digital commerce stores on Adobe Commerce, create all promotions in staging and verify they work before repeating the same steps on production.

For digital commerce stores on Shopify, familiarize yourself with Shopify Flow so you can schedule content. We recommend testing on your pre-production environment to ensure no issues occur on production if you have one.

Where a pre-prod environment is not accessible, make all changes in a new theme so that you can thoroughly test. When ready, this can then be published manually or using Flow.

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

To optimize stock management, conduct reviews of 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 is able to cope with the predicted traffic and that the load doesn’t overwhelm the system. In ecommerce, 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 facilitate 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. In the UK, the average cyberattack costs a business £3.4 million.

Retailers should review their security stance to ensure their storefront has no vulnerabilities. This can be achieved through Pen testing. In addition, consider automated security code tests as a one-off for peak before including them as part of an ongoing delivery process.

Retailers should also be considering their accessibility stance to ensure customers can easily browse and purchase during peak times.

This will act as a deterrent to lawsuits being brought against the retailer, which is a distraction that all digital commerce teams could do without during peak season. This can be achieved through automated accessibility reviews and ensuring storefronts have a clear accessibility statement available.

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.

Another security aspect that heightens in importance during peak season is observability. It’s a crucial time to ensure you have visibility of potentially suspicious traffic or requests coming to the storefront. So have a known, documented process in place for responding to anything that may arise.

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 that 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 times of high 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 key 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 key 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, among the frantic, fast-paced retail environment, having the right observability in place gives retailers the ability to respond to unforeseen challenges while spreading out your email campaign helps to manage traffic surges.

Both of these will help to maintain a smooth and positive customer experience throughout the holiday period.

1. Monitoring

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 campaign driving traffic from a social media platform 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. 

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.  

That insight is paired with our specialist team to resolve issues fast, pinpoint root causes, and surface opportunities for continuous improvement. 

CommerceOps delivers 24/7 visibility, rapid response, and industry-leading resolution times to minimize downtime and protect revenue. Global brands including Sweaty Betty and Dune London use CommerceOps to keep storefronts safeguarded and performing at all times. 

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 to report on performance and to enable you to respond to any situation that may arise.

2. Staggered email campaigns

If there is expected to be a major uplift in traffic following an email send, make sure the key pages have been hit and caught before sending any emails.

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

Add a layer of personalization to your email campaign strategy by segmenting your email list, tailing messages to specific customer groups.

These email personalized emails can also be spread out across peak season to further flatten high traffic spikes while also delivering enhanced customer experiences.

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

Optimize your peak season strategy

If you’re gearing up for peak season, then 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 vast arrays of metrics and activities around the clock, looking for changes in performance against a range of leading KPIs to spot issues quickly and proactively resolve them before they can become problems.

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