With the festive shopping frenzy looming, Campbell Williams, Director of Strategy and Marketing at Six Degrees Group discusses the importance of IT infrastructure the busy time of Black Friday.
If your business is going to play the Black Friday game you have to get it right. It is vital that you can ensure your technology infrastructure will support you. Businesses need a plan to deliver scalability to their web services during these peak times.
2014’s Black Friday event was a shopping day like no other. Online sales increased by 37.5% [1] boosting them to £104bn[2] over all. This trend is set to continue in 2015, but every year websites fail under the strain. So why are some companies still making mistakes when it comes to ensuring their online infrastructure is up to the challenge?
Black Friday has become a predictable retail phenomenon, but many companies are still getting their estimates wrong. For example, last year Argos was the second most visited website on Black Friday in the UK, with 13.5 million unique web visitors. However, during the day its website crashed for two hours: time that is estimated to have cost them up to £5million in potential revenue.
Cloud technology is vital to retail success on black Friday, delivering flexible, scalable, cloud infrastructure that helps to support business critical applications during times of heightened traffic; capacity which can then be scaled down again once the event has calmed down.
Scalability is central to online retailers in order to sustain business operations during busy periods. But this cannot exist in a vacuum: IT experts and retailers need to be business-savvy and predict where the peaks are coming from, allowing extra compute to be added in time.
An MSP that understands its customer’s business needs is vital for retailers to safeguard online sales opportunities now and in the future.