Amazon Prime Day pushes shoppers to inundate the site in search of deals. But Amazon no longer has the event to itself, as other major retailers are now offering promotions of their own that can cause unexpected spikes in digital payments.
With all this anticipated activity, retailers will be challenged to keep their technology up-to-date to meet the demand.
Slow load times, broken links and a poor user experience are unacceptable to shoppers expecting the convenience of online shopping, and this can be the difference between a confirmed order and shopper that looks elsewhere. Websites unable to handle the traffic spikes immediately lose out on sales, and even worse, they negatively impact their brand and disappoint customers who might have otherwise become loyal consumers.
To get the most out of these peak shopping days, retailers need to prioritize and measure the speed of load times. During these busy moments, they also need to protect against downtime and make sure their site doesn’t get overstretched. Optimizing websites to be able to accommodate more traffic must be a long-term goal, not only the special days.
Sites need to take steps to manage increases in speed, scalability, resilience and security, as well as take advantage of significant savings on bandwidth cost, and reduce load on their web server. They also need to take proper security measures by choosing a protected platform. If shoppers feel unsafe, they won’t return.
Online retailers can easily justify the cost of these upgrades by simply calculating the cost of any new hardware, software, or services that they are planning to implement compared to the cost of 1,000, 100, or even just 10 lost sales. It quickly becomes clear that accommodating seasonal traffic makes sound financial sense.
