Black Friday has shifted from being solely a North American tradition to becoming a sales-boosting opportunity for retailers and businesses around the world. With the growth of e-commerce, this date also brought about the need to prepare websites and applications to handle traffic surges while maintaining full availability and high performance. But is it still enough to prepare for just one weekend in November? Find out by reading this blog post.
The Black Friday Tradition
E-commerce has steadfastly evolved over the years, morphing into a significant force in the commercial arena. As it continued to gain importance and relevance, a single day in the calendar emerged as a great landmark for digital businesses—Black Friday. This day, originally characterized by deep discounts and extreme deals, quickly presented itself as a goldmine for e-commerce platforms in the US and then around the world.
However, the flip side of these fantastic sales opportunities is the unprecedented traffic spike that can prove to be an arduous challenge for unprepared e-commerce infrastructures. No longer could platforms compress their yearly performance and reliability stress tests into a single day. As many e-commerce platforms lacked preparedness, revenue loss and desolate downtime could become realities hosting daunting potential consequences.
Therefore, for e-commerce platforms worldwide, it has become a non-negotiable mandate to gird up their infrastructural loins and offer seamless performance and reliability during this critical holiday.
The Pandemic: A Turning Point
When the pandemic paraded onto the global stage, the world watched as life as we knew it dramatically changed. The markets took a severe blow, and economies struggled to stay afloat. But amidst these uncertain times, e-commerce saw a growth spike never seen before. The necessity of buying everyday commodities, items, and even luxuries online became a normal part of life, and the cogs of digital commerce began to spin faster than ever.
Suddenly, a multitude of people found themselves clicking ‘Buy Now’ more often than they were swiping credit cards or counting cash. This shift brought a dramatic increase in the digital buyer populace, making performance and reliability as essential as the products being offered online. Consumer expectations soared, and e-commerce platforms found themselves engaged in a struggle to meet them.
The shifting narrative of consumer behavior meant that the keys to success had changed. E-commerce was no longer about offering an online alternative to brick-and-mortar shopping; it was now about bettering it at every opportunity. Performance and reliability evolved from being an impressive add-on to a sine qua non component of online shopping.
The advent of Black Week and Black November
As businesses adapted to the roaring cries of online consumers, savvy merchants around the world began prepping for maximizing revenue during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period.
The mantra was simple: why limit the sales nirvana to a single day or weekend when one could spread it over an entire week or even a month? This thought gave birth to what we are now used to calling the “Black November”: A whole month dedicated to sales and discounts, aiming to increase revenue to a maximum.
Interestingly enough, 2023’s numbers corroborate the success of this strategy: Based on data from Azion’s biggest clients and other players around the world, e-commerce platforms experienced traffic spikes not just on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but throughout the whole preceding week. This trend served as a sharp reminder of the necessity for businesses to gear up for consistent traffic surges, shifting the focus of their preparations to long-term resilience.
Azion’s Edge Computing Platform Guarantees Peak Performance and Reliability Every Day
In this scenario, Azion’s Edge Computing Platform is renowned for its consistent delivery of peak performance and absolute reliability around the clock. Our platform is engineered carefully to equip our clients with unassailable strength and bulletproof security, proactively offering the best digital tools to safeguard against any unforeseen circumstances.
Through our unwavering commitment to meticulous preparation and a relentless pursuit of perfection, our globally distributed platform has demonstrated its capabilities of delivering top-tier performance, not just on Black Friday, but around the year. We understand that every great sales date, such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s and Father’s Day, are crucial to our clients’ growth and success, and work tirelessly to make sure that they can deliver the best user experience possible at any time, with no risk of downtime whatsoever.
Buoyed by our commitment to delivering the best, our clients have consistently performed exceptionally during these significant commercial sales dates. For instance, thousands of e-commerce websites handled high traffic coming from geographically disperse user bases while still decreasing application load times and improving availability, including for users with low bandwidth. We have a large history of customers that were used to having trouble during high volume events like this increasing revenue by 40%+ after switching to Azion, compared to their previous infrastructure provider.
And that’s not all: Since our platform offers limitless, automatic scalability, you can be prepared for the highest traffic spikes with no risk of overprovisioning. Your applications and websites will scale up to absorb any traffic spikes you might face and automatically scale back down once the high-traffic period is over.
Discover Azion’s Edge Computing Platform
If you envision your website or e-commerce platform offering unparalleled user experience, backed by steady performance all year round with guaranteed zero downtime, then it’s time to switch to Azion’s Edge Computing Platform.
If you want to learn more about the power of the edge and how Azion can help you be prepared for high-sales events, you can talk to an expert right now. You can also set up a free account with us and gain free, hands-on experience with Azion’s Edge Computing Platform with a $ 300.00 credit valid for 12 months, so you can delve into the world of edge computing and uncover its transformative potential for your e-commerce business.
