Black Friday, more traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season for United States, following on from Thanksgiving. However, in 2022, Black Friday is recognised as a highly promoted marketing opportunity with discounted prices across the globe.
It has fast become the busiest shopping day of the year, with a forecast value of spending estimated at 8.71 billion GBP, for this year alone. And, while many companies have meticulously planned their business operations, most will have focused on preparing social media campaigns, designing website landing pages and organising maximum staff levels in customer services and dispatch. However, many will have failed to prepare their applications for a surge in demand and higher website traffic.
Customer Expectations
Customers expect fast page load speeds of no more than three seconds, as standard. But, when a deal is to be had, pressure piles on to convert through the checkout quickly. When it comes to Black Friday, your database cannot fail for a second. And, if it does, you’ll risk bounce rates increasing by up to 73%. So, why are e-commerce retailers failing to consider the speed and availability of their database environments? That’s some food-for-thought.
Fail To Prepare, Prepare To Fail…
GymShark is one of the most pressing cases of Black Friday Downtime, which demonstrates the catastrophic effects that database failure can have on ambitious marketing campaigns, if servers/applications are not considered. In 2015, the fitness apparel and accessories retailer suffered an outage of 8 hours – estimated to cost the company a staggering £100,000.
With a small amount of planning and some additional database housekeeping, you can scale and maximise performance of your servers, to hit sales targets this Black Friday weekend. If you’re unable to facilitate database expertise in house, you should consider WellData’s Database Management Services. It’s your complete solution to improving performance, preventing downtime and increasing data security, 24/7/365. Otherwise, you may benefit from our rapid incident intervention and disaster recovery solution planning.
Preparing For Black Friday
Here’s our top tips on how to prepare your databases for Black Friday, this year:
Scale Up
Analyse yearly website traffic and add a sizeable margin to forecast the demand on servers. You should load test environments as part of your risk assessment for a disaster recovery plan to check for lags in performance and make adjustments as required.
Back Up
Ensure you have an up-to-date successful backup which you can rely on during the high-traffic event. If you do experience a disaster, you can replicate data in another system to restore performance.
Turn Up
Plan for the A-Team to be onsite to restore application functionality quickly and efficiently. If the proactive and preventive measures cannot prevent downtime, you should also make sure a team is available to monitor and maintain your environment, around-the-clock. You should do so all-year-round, but especially during a Black Friday sale.
Get In Touch
Speak to the experts! WellData can maximise the performance of your databases to prepare for your next retail event. Contact us today to find out how our database consultants can assist your IT department.
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