Black Friday is becoming a longer sales marathon, and that of 2021 is the first post-pandemic. For brands that want to take the opportunity to increase sales, increase and retain their customers, it's imperative to bolster infrastructure in readiness for massive web traffic.
For many people, the shopping season is the best time of the year, but it is certainly the busiest for retailers. Hordes of eager gift shoppers flock to stores and websites during November and December, with sales that can account for up to 30 % of a company's annual sales. And especially on peak shopping days, such as Black Friday. Online merchants see three times more traffic than usual.
This figure is destined to grow further this year, given the eCommerce boom linked to the pandemic. To take advantage of this increased activity on the web, retailers must rapidly expand their infrastructures and operations to cope with the surge in demand. It is not an easy task, but AWS provides an architecture center that delivers deep architecture insights, diagrams, solutions, patterns, and best practices for optimal enhancements before, during, and after Black Friday.
AWS Best Practices Framework Helps You Not Miss a Single Sale
We know that increasingly customers want frictionless shopping experiences. Forward-thinking eCommerce stores and retailers will leverage AWS Well-Architected Framework to help users effortlessly and comfortably complete their online shopping.
Imagine the frustration that a potential customer might feel, perhaps already ready to click on "Buy now" to see that the site collapses and is no longer reachable. No, no, no. Bad sign! And often, this will lead him to give up and turn to a competitor.
AWS Well-Architected Framework helps sellers and retailers figure out what is working and what is not and what could be better in their entire infrastructure. This delivers opportunities for efficiency in the face of extreme traffic spikes and ways to cut costs and improve security.
AWS Solutions for Black Friday IT
To avoid losing customers and damaging the brand image due to an unplanned website block, the most experienced technology leaders test their infrastructures well in advance. Many rely on AWS cloud solutions to dynamically add more compute and storage resources as site traffic rises and then automatically scale down as demand decreases. In addition to preventing outages, the transfer of traffic often reduces the cost of hosting the infrastructure.
Furthermore, another aspect not to be underestimated is related to speed. While smartphone purchases are overtaking desktop purchases, over 50% of sites are abandoned when it takes more than three seconds to load.
To reduce latency on their mobile sites and apps during the holidays, retailers can use AWS cloud solutions that deliver content across all points of presence distributed globally. AWS' fault injection simulator empowers retailers to test their websites (undertones of pressure) for failures before the actual high traffic day. This is the famous chaos engineering that could save you thousands of dollars in losses this Black Friday.
But it's not just about online sales. AWS high-speed hosting can help shorten waiting times - and long queues - even for in-store shoppers, now that many retailers have adopted cloud-based solutions that allow salespeople to make payments by card. Because all the information gets stored in the cloud rather than locally, these systems have the added benefit of seamlessly integrating with other data sources, such as loyalty program records and recommendation engines.
What Are the Characteristics of The Ideal Cloud Server for Black Friday?
Even when you can seamlessly adjust the computing power of your cloud server or, more generally, of your architecture in time, the importance of careful and continuous monitoring, which is a sort of operational supervision, must be considered.
Suppose the campaign you have in mind for Black Friday, for example, was to be very successful. In the face of particular traffic spikes, a slowdown in the loading times of the landing pages or even their unreachability would cause severe damage to your business. You will witness a practically immediate abandonment of users, not to mention the reputation of your brand.
Hence technical factor, i.e., the adequacy of the cloud infrastructure and the human one, i.e., the adequacy of the type of assistance offered by the provider, is essential.
To summarize in a few points, the below characteristics make AWS an ideal cloud for Black Friday and the optimal reaction to traffic spikes:
- It has immediate scalability that does not involve variations of any kind: where it is enough, in short, to adapt the resources with vertical upgrades
- You can add other virtual machines and scale those machines that already make up the web architecture
- Ease of use and flexible, good infrastructure optimization/tuning
- Reliable security and encryptions
- Amazon Cloudfront helps with low latency and seamless content delivery
- Workload sharing enables seamless collaboration for robust architecture implementation for transparency, efficiency, and security
- Fast response one-on-one support
Do you want to know more about how AWS solutions can empower you to create a high-performing infrastructure for Black Friday? We have helped many eCommerce providers optimize efficiency and profitability with cloud solutions. Book a meeting today.