E-commerce & Retail Stores Challenges During Peak Sales: How to Prevent Downtime

Why is it so crucial to keep customers satisfied? Because 88% of people do not return to websites after having a negative user experience. With retail e-commerce sales reaching $4.8 trillion in 2023 and expected to grow to $9 trillion by 2032, developing a scalable and high-performing e-commerce website is essential.

Many elements are coming into play in driving revenue for the company. One of the most important ones is to choose a reliable and secure IT infrastructure that avoids downtime in case of a natural disaster or an unexpected event to minimize the risk of financial loss. These necessities require larger energy powers, seamless connectivity between the e-commerce website and the end-user and greater security measures regarding business data protection.

Therefore, this blog will look at the core challenges e-commerce and retail stores face during peak sales and suggest ways how data centers can become a resilient IT partner in overcoming them and taking care of e-commerce infrastructure and business continuity.

With seasonal campaigns often driving massive traffic to e-commerce websites, businesses must optimize their IT infrastructure to handle high demand, thereby avoiding downtime and preventing potential losses in revenue and reputation.

Nothing threatens this goal more than unexpected disturbances in business continuity, especially during peak sales periods like Singles Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. According to Adobe Analytics, in 2024 consumers in United States set a record by spending $41.1 billion online during Cyber Five (5 consecutive days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday). $13.3 billion were spent on Cyber Monday alone. Online sales on Black Friday reached $10.8 billion (+10.2% from the Black Friday in 2023).

Additionally, even though social media platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are not directly connected to e-commerce websites, they play a crucial role during the shopping campaign season in driving traffic to the e-commerce store and keeping the customer engaged.

For example, shopping on social media is getting stronger. There is even a term for that. “Social commerce” refers to shopping online without exiting social media platforms. It is getting more popular as, in 2024, it is forecasted to reach nearly 700 billion dollars in revenue and multiply in the upcoming years. And it is no surprise that trends like livestream shopping and short-form video engage customers, build a community around the brand, and shorten the purchase path.

Real-time data processing allows retailers to manage bottlenecks in e-commerce stores' supply chains efficiently. Not addressing them proactively can negatively affect e-commerce businesses. Customers may abandon their shopping carts or choose alternative platforms due to failures, posing a significant risk of lost revenue.

Considering that, neglecting e-commerce infrastructure can lead to server overloads and latency issues, especially during high-traffic periods. This could result in prolonged server outages caused by a massive volume of visitors.

According to HITC research, in 2022, the Nike website was down for shoppers, and many noted that the site had been down “all day’’ thus not allowing them to buy anything. The message displayed on the website reads: “We’re aware of an issue impacting access to Nike.com. Thank you for your patience.”

Most of these challenges e-commerce sites experience during peak sales revolve around technology and fulfilment, therefore partnering with data centers can help businesses navigate these issues more effectively.

Trustworthy data centers ensure high-security standards, appropriate environment and cooling, video surveillance, backup, support availability 24/7 and other operations for the safety and security of business data and systems; therefore, they are ideal IT partners for e-commerce stores.

There are several key challenges that e-commerce websites encounter during high traffic loads that data centers can help with:

• Cyberthreats

As online activity increases during peak seasons, e-commerce store owners face increased cybersecurity threats: DDoS, Web-Skimming, Bot attacks, Ransomware, data breaches, or personal data leakage. Redundant infrastructure across various data centers can recover data if a problem occurs.

• Server Errors and Scalability

A common cause of website crashes can occur during peak active sales season, primarily if the provider hosts multiple e-commerce platforms, resulting in issues such as HTML Error 500; this problem can be triggered by various reasons, even severe weather-related outages, poorly designed website or cloud-based infrastructure, and can be identified by monitoring the hosting or e-commerce cloud provider’s status and anticipating higher loads, with prevention measures involving migrating to other cloud solution provider or adding resources for peak loads.

• Website Performance

High traffic affects website performance, necessitating optimization for speed and reliability. Businesses must optimize websites for speed and performance to ensure a seamless user experience and reduce crashes and slow loading times. Therefore, data centers use load balancing to distribute traffic evenly across multiple servers and enhance speed even during high-traffic periods.

• Compliance

Data centers comply with data security, uptime, business continuity and operational efficiency standards and frameworks such as Tier III, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 22301, PCI DSS and GDPR to protect e-commerce data, transactions, operations and maintain trust.

For business owners, choosing between e-commerce IT solutions such as dedicated servers and cloud computing solutions can significantly impact the desired outcome. Those prioritizing performance, security, and customization choose to rent dedicated servers, while others who aim for rapid scalability, cost efficiency, and high availability choose cloud-based infrastructure.

As dedicated servers offer exclusive resource allocation and complete control over server configurations, large-scale e-commerce stores that can’t afford downtime or performance lags and handle sensitive data can benefit from that. This way, the website will always stay fast and secure – even during high traffic.

However, e-commerce stores that face seasonal (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.) website traffic spikes can benefit from cloud computing solutions as they offer more flexibility. Cloud solutions excel at load balancing and disaster recovery, making websites resilient to sudden traffic spikes and recover from disruptions. And the best part is that businesses can increase or decrease IT resources during the peak sales season based on necessity.

The most secure and reliable cloud computing solution for e-commerce business owners is a Private Cloud. Compared to public clouds, you have dedicated hardware with virtualization of your choice, such as VMware, Hyper-V, or another hypervisor. Hence, you can operate with customer-sensitive data and transactions and be confident that no other tenants of the public cloud will affect your IT resources, as it is a dedicated solution.

You might also consider a hybrid cloud option, keeping sensitive data secure in a private cloud while using a public cloud for high-demand periods.

Whether focused on speed, cost savings, or future growth, aligning the strategy with the most suitable e-commerce infrastructure can make or break business’ success story.

Besides public, private or hybrid cloud solutions, e-commerce and retail stores can benefit from self-service cloud platforms like myDelska. Quick, scalable IT resources are essential during peak sales seasons. Deploying virtual machines (VMs) in seconds ensures that an e-commerce website can handle sudden traffic surges without sacrificing performance or reliability.

Also, if you are in search of VMware alternatives, explore our self-service cloud platform myDelska! The platform is available 24/7/365, allowing you to purchase and deploy resources instantly. Hence, if your anticipated loads appear higher, look no further; you can add resources to your sales campaign periods straight away. Regular and high-performance virtual machines are available to provide sufficient IT resources.

For example, the myDelska cloud platform offers advanced features such as:

• A latency measurement map;
• A real-time network topology;
• A selection of public and private networks;
• Unmetered traffic;
• Advanced backup options;
• Flexible firewall options (private & shared);
• Monitoring notifications via email, Slack, and SMS to stay informed about your IT infrastructure;
• API for integration with your service and automatic virtual machines’ creation;
• Certified technical support for additional help and rapid problem-solving.

These and many more features enable technical teams to easily scale IT resources, optimize network performance, minimize downtime, and stay ahead in a fast-paced digital market. Explore myDelska cloud platform now!

1. Pre-inspect your tech stack & infrastructure

Before the peak season, review your network configuration, server hardware, software, and operating systems. Check for any newly installed applications or programs and ensure that all systems are up to date with the latest patches and updates.

2. Plan & predict necessary resource usage

Create a plan that maps out your expected traffic and peak hours. Test your bandwidth ahead of time to ensure it can handle the load. Add extra storage space and plan enough backup power to support your systems. Train your team to use new tools and applications and review security protocols.

3. Perform traffic and volume analysis

Analyzing historical trends of your website traffic and order volume based on data gathered year-over-year will help you set and meet the right expectations of your customers during the holiday season.

4. Practice good habits

Optimize images for a fast e-commerce site. It’s essential that visitors can shop uninterrupted during the holiday season, but you might need to push changes to your production environment during this time. Configure your project so that the customer experiences zero downtime during these deployments.

5. Protect your site

As hackers become more sophisticated, merchants must run the latest software, especially as we head into peak season. Bad actors know that businesses are distracted during busy periods and often use this as an opportunity to strike.

6. Testing and optimizing e-commerce infrastructure

To ensure efficient operations during peak periods, IT infrastructure must be thoroughly tested in advance. This includes assessing site performance, page load time, and server capacity.

7. Check your site speed: a slow site means no sales

Slow site speed directly hurts your profit margins. In fact, ecommerce sites that load within a second convert 2.5x more visitors than those that load in five seconds.

You want to make sure that doesn't happen on your website.

There are several free tools you can use to test your website speed. One of them is Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

If you find your site speed is too slow, simple things you can do are:

• Compress images with image optimization tools
• Remove unused apps/plugins from your website
• Reduce the amount of page redirects on your website
• Use third-party apps for page speed

Improved page speed can have a direct positive effect on your BFCM sales.

Nowadays, maintaining a robust and scalable e-commerce infrastructure is a priority, particularly during peak sales seasons. Delska advanced data centers and network infrastructure holds Uptime Institute Tier III Design and Facility, Information Security Management (ISO/IEC 27001:2022), Business Continuity Management (ISO 22301:2019), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and other certifications, ensuring the highest security and data protection standards.

Investigate the challenges, speak with Delska data center experts, strengthen your website against downtime during the ‘golden’ last months of the year, and confidently navigate the complexities of peak seasons to ensure a smooth, profitable customer experience.