Since last year with the COVID-19, online commerce has undergone a growth trend becoming the main sales channel for customers, especially in peak sales seasons such as Black Friday, sales, Cyber Monday, …
So that you are prepared to face this period of peak sales and do not disappoint your customers with a slow site or errors, from Geko Cloud we have prepared a list of tips that can help you successfully manage and avoid stress during this important period of the year.
Reasons for the sales peak
A sales peak is when there is an exponential growth in sales, in this case, online sales. These peaks tend to occur during holiday periods, such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Black Friday, etc.
4 points to bear in mind so that your website doesn’t crash
A sales peak can generate high profits for your business, but in order to obtain the expected results, you must know how to manage it effectively to get the most out of it. Below we explain some of the points that you should take into account to efficiently scale the sales peak:
- Omni-channel: To achieve omnichannel under-delivery you need to move away from legacy technology and look for solutions specifically designed to leverage both distribution centers and shops. Doing so can help you keep your brand promise to the customer and maintain profitability through smarter use of stock, which is critical to meeting consumer demands during peak sales.
- Manage the peak traffic of your e-commerce: You should identify how much traffic your website can support, this way you can anticipate, optimise performance in high sales peaks, and make an estimate of the resources needed to prevent visitors from abandoning your website due to low performance. One of the most important resources is to have a good hosting provider that is prepared to receive a large number of visitors. Another method of managing your website traffic, in scenarios such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or during the Christmas season, is to improve the traceability of your platform through monitoring technologies, such as Prometheus, FLuent, InfluxDB, among others, to identify and be able to predict the volume of traffic to your e-commerce and take the appropriate measures to avoid saturating your website.
- Monitor the loading speed at all times: Next you should test the loading speed of the website, not only of the main pages but also of the product pages, to see if it can handle a one-off traffic increase, thus exploring options to scale the server capacity when necessary. Some of the tools that can help you are Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
- Scalable infrastructure: Page speed is not the only factor that affects conversions or bounce rates. In order for your platform to properly support traffic peaks, it is advisable to have an infrastructure that adapts to the needs at all times, for this, it is advisable to use auto-scaling groups for the machines, so that they are properly monitored and configured, so that they adapt as quickly as possible to the needs of each moment without wasting resources and, therefore, money. Having a microservices-oriented platform can also be of great help in these cases, as they allow us to scale resources more locally and, therefore, more efficiently in terms of performance and costs. Technologies such as Kubernetes or other container orchestrators facilitate this configuration by allowing us to scale our services with respect to countless parameters, such as CPU usage, memory consumption, or a number of requests received, among many others.
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