With the British Retail Consortium predicting that this month’s Black Friday will be a third bigger than last year, Paul Heywood, Managing Director and VP of EMEA, Dyn looks at what this means in terms of retail opportunity, customer experience and IT strategy.
With this Black Friday set to be the biggest one yet, retailers need to be ready. Last year, websites of big, well known brands buckled under the strain of millions of shoppers flooding their pages but customers, today, want a trouble-free, efficient online experience and to be able to make their purchases right in the moment. Therefore, it is crucial that the online customer experience doesn’t suffer because of traffic peaks; if the page is slow to load or process an order you will lose customers, money and relationships.
Without a reliable and high performing online infrastructure in place, retailers are at risk of damaging their brand if their website crashes and they cannot accommodate the huge volumes of web traffic to their site. Brands cannot afford to lose out because of a website malfunction, transaction failure or outage.
So whilst retailers are pulling out all the stops to ensure this Black Friday is as successful as possible, with the majority of them intending to build extra capacity into the websites and rent additional bandwidth, they should also look to monitor the performance, availability and reachability of their entire online infrastructure. In addition, by being able to re-route traffic and balance load across servers, retailers are then in the best position to react quickly in the event of a faulty service.
At busy times the performance of your website is crucial to whether a customer will come back to buy from you again. Your user experience on days such as Black Friday needs to be better than your competitors, especially as customers will happily go and look for products elsewhere.
By Paul Heywood
Managing Director and VP of EMEA
Dyn