Introduction
Black Friday 2020 will be the first big online sales of the COVID-19 era. But, there is a notable difference compared to 2019.
From March of this year, many websites have experienced high traffic. And some of them proved to be not prepared for that.
We can indeed say that the shift online caused by the virus had benefited those retailers with the smoothest ecommerce operations and who managed to cope with the shift in demand.
Great expectations after the pandemic
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 2020 Black Friday sales. The below are some of our recommendations:
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 the platform performance and tailor the capacity accordingly
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 ensure issue detection and anticipation
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 maximum: granting full observability and predicting possible problems.
Real time service check to guarantee an uninterrupted purchase experience for the customer
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 rapid issue resolution
Acting in a timely fashion is critical during Black Friday, every service incident 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:
- The shopping journey starts online: Nowadays, 87% of shopping journeys start online. This implies that 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.
- 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.
- 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.
How are you preparing for Black Friday 2020?
Write to us if you are interested to find out how we can help your ecommerce.
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