Retail Decoded with JD Trask, CEO and Co-Founder, Raygun.
We’re coming up alarmingly fast on Christmas, and while that may bring a welcome break for many, it’s often the opposite for retailers and particularly the food and beverage sector. At Raygun, we look after a lot of customers in the US, and as I write this, we’ve been helping them gear up for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period. Though these sale days aren’t quite as show-stopping in New Zealand as they are offshore, they can still put a lot of pressure on e-commerce systems, and the Christmas period will bring even bigger surges. When it comes to preparing for massive shopping periods, seasoned business owners will have an established checklist; staff to cover additional shifts, ordering extra stock, prepping promotional material, and so on. But with digital sales ramping up year-on-year, it’s equally important to make sure your website is robust enough to withstand peak periods.
Even world-leading retailers can fall victim to preventable performance issues, and we’ve all heard horror stories about outages caused by traffic surges. In 2021, Office Depot went down for hours on Cyber Monday, while other massive brands like Walmart and GameStop also reported extended outages. One particularly eye-watering statistic from the Consortium for Information and Software Quality tells us that in 2020, operational software failures cost $1.56 trillion in the US alone, which is ten times more expensive than finding and fixing issues before releasing software into operation.
So today, I thought I’d talk about preventing the tech mishaps that can wreak havoc during your holiday surges. Smart planning and stable technology choices can help you catch issues before they become disasters and save damage to your reputation, relationships, and revenue.
Don’t make any changes immediately before or during busy periods
That may be stating the obvious, but it might also be tempting to add a festive animation to your homepage, try out a new third-party extension on your site to help with issuing gift vouchers, or any number of other extras to make the most of the silly season. These seemingly harmless or helpful changes might cause your site to slow right down or break something entirely. If you’re going to do something different, make sure you’ve tested it carefully, well in advance.
Make sure you can trust your systems
Are you using a Content Management System like WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace? How is your website hosted? Do you use external servers? Check with your developers or IT provider that your systems are scalable and have the capacity to handle a significant increase in traffic.
Mobile matters
2021 was the first year that mobile surpassed desktop on Black Friday, with 54 percent of purchases occurring on mobile devices. Mobile can no longer be an afterthought. To make sure your website is mobile-optimised, drop your URL into Google’s mobile-friendliness checking tool. I’ve talked in previous columns about using the Google customer experience score to assess the quality of your website, and this system is also focused primarily on mobile. Enter your website URL in PageSpeed Insights and toggle to the mobile view to produce a list of suggestions on how to optimise your site for visitors on mobile devices.
Support
If you’re selling to an international market, or even dealing with last-minute, late-night shoppers at home, you’ll likely see support requests coming through at odd times. You’ve probably already thought about having somebody available outside normal business hours to answer general support calls, but consider adding somebody who can help with technical support and troubleshooting during periods of high traffic.
A fast and functional website is indispensable to take advantage of holiday shopping activity, especially as post-pandemic e-commerce sales remain at historic highs. If you’re looking to grow your business and maintain full confidence in the stability and speed of your site all year round, it’s worth looking into a monitoring solution that will detect any errors or abnormalities in your software and alert your team before your customers are impacted.
A few simple preventative steps can protect your profits during the most important retail periods of the year, and there’s still time to health-check your digital store and take a few precautionary measures.
I’ve touched on a few technical concepts in this piece, so if you’d like a bit more detail or have follow-up questions, I’m always available to share answers. Reach out to jdtrask@raygun.com.
