Insights

For eCommerce retailers, spikes in demand don’t fall into a neat pattern. Peaks are not always seasonal, predictable, or well defined – for every Christmas or Black Friday frenzy, there are many other sharp spikes that can’t be plotted in advance on a calendar, from ticket sales to promotional periods and new product launches.

When huge volumes of visitors hit a website at the same time retailers have an unparalleled opportunity to increase sales – but visits only translate into sales if the retailer’s online systems are stable, fast, and scalable enough to perform under peak loads. Pages which load slowly or generate error messages not only damage conversion rates, they turn off customers for good, with up to 80% of visitors never returning after a poor experience.

The result? Dissatisfied customers and stock sitting in warehouses that ought to be flying out of the door. Bad news for the business; great news for its competitors.

So, how can businesses make sure they are prepared to manage peak demand – no matter when or how it takes hold?

1. Continuous preparation is king

Preparing for peaks should never be a short-term challenge or a sticking-plaster solution. This is because performance risks that cause issues during peak periods are often engrained and not easy to resolve quickly. Businesses must adopt a formal approach to traffic management, and embrace a long-term strategy that detects and deals with performance risks continuously throughout the year as changes are rolled out, ensuring that website resiliency is factored into the entire application and infrastructure design. Consider the demand curve – when online orders suddenly ramp up, can your infrastructure scale at the same rate?

Performance engineering helps to ensure that systems function smoothly no matter what’s thrown at them – but this only works if practices are embedded and continually reinforced in advance of any peaks. It takes time to test project changes and expose performance risks, so businesses should avoid only relying on autoscaling as a catch-all harmonising solution and instead take a more proactive, year-round approach.

Retailers that leverage Capacitas’ Prepare for Peak solution are equipped with the best consultancy expertise to kickstart their preparations, from setting targets to continuous testing and contingency planning. This helps ensure that mission-critical systems, such as stock management, are fighting fit and ready to navigate the busiest periods.

2. Prioritise database scalability

Scalability is only as good as the poorest performing component, which for the majority of eCommerce retailers is likely to be the database.

As the central hub from which all users draw access, the database can cause particular scalability issues. During peaks, an influx of web server clones and other undesirable patterns of access often leads to excessive database locking, resulting in instability and outages. When databases come under increased pressure, they may also overconsume physical and logical resources such as CPU, memory, disk, connections, and cache. This directly impacts the overall scalability of the eCommerce platform – so businesses must now prioritise more efficient database access.

One way they can do this is by implementing an effective caching strategy. Taking away the bulk of the processing from slower, centralised components, such as the database, eases the pressure and brings images and other content closer to the user. This ensures that the user experience is optimised for performance, helping the business to achieve vital scalability and stability objectives.

3. Beware of bot attacks

Not all peaks are good news for retailers. Demand can unfortunately be bot driven, with malicious bots snatching up products during peak trading hours and reselling them at huge markups. These targeted attacks on eCommerce websites are on the rise: bot traffic increased 106% year-on-year in 2021, and 83% of companies say that bots are becoming more sophisticated and more difficult for their security tools to detect.

Network defence solutions offer a certain level of protection, but if enough traffic still gets through to the website, major disruption can take hold and shut out genuine users – potentially resulting in seven-figure revenue losses. To beat the bots – even when traffic arrives very suddenly – websites need to be engineered to scale rapidly and robustly. This can be achieved by, for example, reducing website processing inefficiency caused by sub-optimal coding.

Alternatively, it’s possible to limit the impact of a bot by having the correct level of website observability. This allows bots to be detected quickly, therefore allowing recovery actions to be taken swiftly or even automated. Capacitas is experienced in helping retailers implement effective management strategies for bot traffic so that they can quickly identify and respond to attacks and block rogue IP addresses.

4. Customer experience - It's a marathon, not a sprint

It’s no secret that the time taken to load a page on an online store affects its commercial performance. In fact, our research shows that online stores can gain an additional £20 million in revenue per year by speeding their sites up by just one second!

However, customers are usually prepared to tolerate one additional second of response time during peak periods, especially if they are busy seeking out the best deals on the website. What customers won’t tolerate, though, is extended downtime, restrictive queuing systems, and system bottlenecks. This is why retailers need to prioritise the continuous customer experience, which encompasses scalability, performance, and reliability.

To minimise downtime during both expected and unexpected peaks, planning must be an ongoing and continuous process. Ensuring that website resiliency is factored into all aspects of application and infrastructure design will help support continuous service – and thorough resiliency testing will give further assurances that recovery procedures are working as they should. In addition to improving the customer experience, this will ensure retailers are better placed to optimise technology investments, control costs, and achieve their growth goals – allowing them to thrive all year round.

If you want to prepare for future peaks in the most comprehensive, efficient, and cost-effective way possible, speak to one of our team today.