It’s Black Friday all week for AlertBot! All new signups this week get 20% off for the life of their account! Use promo code 2021BF20 when you sign up to claim this deal!

https://www.AlertBot.com

6 Tips to Prepare Your E-Commerce Site for the Biggest Holiday Traffic Surge Ever

by Louis Kingston

So it begins.

No, we are not talking about the school year, the football season, or a dizzying array of television shows about zombies, detectives, and of course: zombie detectives (seriously, it’s a thing).

Rather, we are talking about the beginning of what for most ecommerce businesses is the make-or-break race to the end of the year called “gift buying season.” Except this year, things are going to be different.

To understand why, let’s zoom in on what, for most ecommerce businesses, is the most critical period of the gift buying season — Cyber Week — which starts on Thanksgiving, and runs through to Cyber Monday. According to research by BigCommerce.com, during Cyber Week 2019 same-store sales across all verticals increased by a whopping 21% compared to Cyber Week 2018, and the average order value jumped by 10%.

And now, we come to 2020, a year in which billions of people are either obligated or advised to stay at home. These folks aren’t going to even consider hopping into their car to navigate the mall jungle. Instead, they’re going to pause Fortnite, minimize Reddit, crack their knuckles, replace the battery in their mouse, and BUY all kinds of stuff online: from toaster ovens to 60” 4K TVs to luxury sneakers to mounted singing bass fish (remember those?).

Simply put: 2020 is not just going to break e-commerce sales records, but it is going to obliterate them. In fact, in terms of how many people buy stuff online and how much they buy, there may never be another year quite like it in terms of year-over-year surges in volume and value.

For e-commerce businesses, this makes the 2020 gift buying season absolutely critical — which in turn means that crashed or slow websites are NOT OK. In fact, the mere idea of their possible existence is horrifying and just plain unacceptable, like a floating island of fire ants (which, unfortunately, is also a thing).

To prevent a catastrophe worse than anything the Griswold Family might experience, here are six essential things do to:

1. Anticipate how much traffic is likely to arrive — keeping in mind that it’s probably going to be much higher than in past years during Cyber Week and throughout the remainder of 2020 — and proactively ensure that the host can handle the load. For more insight and advice, read our article on how to prevent traffic spikes from crashing your website.

2. Assess site speed, and if necessary dial up the velocity (and then dial it up some more). If you have any doubts about this, read our article on the 3 reasons why website speed is more important than ever.

3. Eliminate the 4 common causes of cart abandonment: unexpected costs, forcing customers to create an account, a long and winding checkout process, and bugs.

4. Optimize the mobile shopping and purchasing experience. During Cyber Week in 2019, mobile orders were responsible for 49% of all online sales.

5. Analyze and address security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, shoppers aren’t the only people who love e-commerce sites — hackers do too, and they demonstrate their affection by deploying malware and launching DDoS attacks.

6. Use a reputable and proven site uptime and availability monitoring solution like AlertBot, which will instantly notify authorized individuals (e.g. webmasters, sysadmins, etc.) if something goes wrong.

The Bottom Line

There aren’t many things that can be said with certainty about 2020. However, two things make the list: we will hear the phrase “new normal” at least a thousand more times before the year is up, and the gift buying season for e-commerce businesses is going to be colossal.

Whether that is colossal good (think Avengers) or colossal bad (think the Death Star) will largely be determined by the six essential factors described above. Which epic story do you want your e-commerce business to tell in the months ahead?

Try AlertBot today and see why it’s trusted and recommended by some of the world’s biggest enterprises. There’s no billing information to provide, nothing to download, and you’ll be completely set up in minutes — click here.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

While we’re still recovering from full bellies and empty wallets from the Thanksgiving celebratory weekend, we poured over the performance results for each site to drill in to see how they compared to last year’s event.

As usual, we used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor all three sites from Thanksgiving Day through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, spanning from November 22, 2018 to November 26, 2018. We expected strong, reliable performance again during the entire run and we were not disappointed. The results were nothing short of impressive. In fact, we were impressed to mostly see improvement this year over last year.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Last year, in an unusual feat, each site experienced not a single error or failure event. The same mostly held true for 2018, but both Walmart.com and Target.com struggled with a few slow file load times (which can cause a page to load slower), but it was never enough to cause any actual site downtime. With that in mind, we think it’s still fine to award 10’s across the board.

(Amazon 10/10)
(Walmart 10/10)
(Target 10/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Last year was the first time we ran this event, so it was interesting to be able to compare last year’s results with this year’s. Ecommerce sites tend to have very graphics-heavy designs, and especially with sale events like these, the graphics are often big, frequently changing, and sometimes even animated or video-driven. (Amazon even had live video streaming at one point throughout the purchasing frenzy!)

With that said, through Amazon.com’s 5-day run, they saw the fastest day, on average, to be Sunday, November 25^th with 4.2 seconds—which is almost exactly what last year was (Their fastest was also a Sunday at 4.3 seconds). Their slowest day, on average, was actually on Black Friday itself at 4.5 seconds, which, admittedly, still isn’t too bad. When looking at specific times of day for performance, the best hour was 7AM on Sunday with an impressive 2.6 seconds (an improvement over last year by almost a full second), while the day before saw the slowest hour at noon with a dismal 9.3 seconds (which was significantly worse than last year).
(Amazon 9/10)

Walmart.com was the fastest last year and proved not only to hold that title again this year, but they also showed improvement! Their best average day was Cyber Monday, November 26th at 3.8 seconds. Their worst day on average was Sunday, November 25^th,  at 4.1 seconds (Coincidentally, it was also Nov. 25^th last year, but this year it was almost a full second faster). Finally, their best hour on average was on Cyber Monday at an impressive 1.8 seconds at 6PM. Their worst time on average was 6.9 seconds at 5PM on Black Friday, which is not when you want to be experiencing your slowest web speed.
(Walmart 9.5/10)

Last, but certainly not least, Target.com performed respectably, but once again underperformed in comparison to the other two. Their best day for speed, on average, was Black Friday at 5.4 seconds, which is not only worse than both Amazon and Walmart’s worst days, but it’s .2 seconds slower than their performance last year. Target’s slowest day on average was Cyber Monday, November 26 at 6.3 seconds, almost a full second slower than last year. Their fastest hour turned out to be on Black Friday at 5AM with 3.1 seconds, which is a slight improvement, with their slowest time being on Monday at 3PM with 8.9 seconds, over a second longer than last year, and sadly during mid-day on Cyber Monday.
(Target 8.5/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

California has almost always come out on top as the fastest state, but this year they were consistently dethroned by none other than Oregon! For Amazon.com, the ecommerce mega-site saw average load times of 1.4 seconds in the The Beaver State, with their next-fastest location being Ohio at 1.6 seconds and Nevada at 1.8 seconds. When it came to their slowest locations, Washington, D.C. took the prize at a sluggish 7.5 seconds and Washington state clocking in at 7.3 seconds.
(Amazon 9/10)

Just like in 2017, Walmart.com was faster, but by a mere millisecond, seeing an average load time of 1.3 seconds in Oregon. Nevada and Ohio followed at Amazon’s fastest time, 1.4 seconds. Washington state saw the site’s slowest load time at 6.8 seconds, with Colorado coming in at 6.5 seconds and Texas at 6.3 seconds – all of them being faster than Amazon’s worst locations.
(Walmart 9.5/10)

Target actually saw some improvement this year with its average load time being fastest in Nevada at 2.3 seconds in (last year’s was 2.7 in California), while Oregon came in second at 2.5 seconds and Ohio third at 2.7 seconds. And like last year, Target’s fastest speeds proved to be slower than their competitors. The slowest average speed that Target saw in the U.S. was sadly worse than last year. Washington state clocked in at a truly dismal 10.7-second average load time, with Colorado a second behind at 9.6 seconds, and Texas at 9.3 seconds. It’s unfortunate that Target continues to miss the mark for website speed.
(Target 8.5/10)

Usability

For usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites we’re testing and replicate it. For last year’s Showdown, we decided to see what the experience would be like to use these three different websites to add a common product to the shopping cart. To do this, we selected one item to search for and add to our cart, and this year we decided to do the same again.

For each of these processes, we picked an easy item to search for, and sought to add a Blu-Ray copy of Disney and Pixar’s Incredibles 2 to our shopping cart. To begin each process, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.amazon.com into our Chrome browser, typing “Incredibles 2 blu-ray” into the store’s search box, and adding it to the cart, it took 34 seconds. From the front page, it took about 5 clicks (including having to log in to get to the final checkout) to get to the “Place your order” window.

From the point of typing www.walmart.com into Chrome and going through the same process, it took about 6 clicks and 32 seconds to log in and get to the final cart checkout page.

And from the point of typing www.target.com into our Chrome browser, it also took about 6 clicks and 32 seconds to log in and get to the checkout window.

Each site was a good experience to use, although each one has a different feel and approach. It’s a tough call to say which user experience we found to be better, but each one was straightforward and easy to use. If we judge the sites based on search results, Amazon tried suggesting a few things unrelated to the specific search of the “blu-ray” disc first (like a Jurassic Park daily deal and a preorder for Venom), while both Target and Walmart have more direct and accurate results (even though Walmart suggests the DVD and 4K before the actual blu-ray). In that case, we’d have to give Walmart and Target a little more props for accuracy in their product search.

(Amazon 9.5/10)
(Walmart 9.5/10)
(Target 10/10)

Verdict

With stakes this high once again, you would only expect the best from the leaders in ecommerce, so it comes as no surprise that the results were so good and so close.

With all things accounted for – reliability, speed, geographical performance, and the site’s usability – we’ve reached our verdict, and it surprises even us for a second year in a row:

Winner:

The report examined several sites that had experienced minor to substantial down times over the course of Friday thru Sunday, including NeimanMarcus.com and Staples.com. Our report, however, did not take into account Cyber Monday or the sales-heavy weeks that have followed.

On Cyber Monday, Neiman Marcus seemed to right the ship, while only a few sites appeared to experience no more than about 10-minute failures–including NewEgg.com and Staples–with Gap’s site registering 19 minutes of being unresponsive.

Throughout this month of December, Staples has continued to struggle with short outages; Walmart experienced some brief HTTP errors; while Footlocker, PC Mall, Crate & Barrel and Peapod all experienced just a couple few-minute hiccups (which in some cases could simply just be sluggish load times).

With online sales outperforming brick and mortar sales this Black Friday for the first time, it’s imperative now more than ever to make sure your site stays up and working, error-free. Sign up for a free 14-day trial with AlertBot.com today and start working towards a more successful ecommerce site!

Get Your Website Ready For Holiday Traffic

It’s that time of year again. As we say farewell to summer and prepare for the coming of autumn next week, online retailers are faced with one harsh reality: Black Friday is a mere two months away. And while that may seem like a long time from now to some, now is really the time for preparation. And just like any brick and mortar retailer needs to have their store ready to go with employees on hand to wrangle the shopping masses, websites need to make sure their site is tuned up and ready for an influx of traffic.

If you’re feeling pretty confident that you’re ready and that this warning may seem premature or unnecessary altogether, let’s take a moment to spotlight last year’s Black Friday festivities and pitfalls.

The biggest name to have experienced major website failures last November was electronics retail chain Best Buy. Issues were recorded and reported on throughout the day on Black Friday and it sent social media abuzz with chatter and complaints about the site’s performance—or lack thereof.

Best Buy wasn’t the only one affected, however. Computer company HP’s webstore also experienced failure, while in the UK, online stores Currys (electronics), Argos (department store) and Tesco (groceries) all went down as well.

So what can we glean from this?

If you’re an online retailer, you’re probably already thinking about the holidays and getting prepared, but now is the most crucial time to not only make sure you have reliable website monitoring, but to evaluate your website’s performance so you can make improvements before the big online sale days. And you’re in luck – AlertBot can assist with your performance evaluation and help you rest assured that your site will perform better in time for the holidays. Try it out for free with our 14-day trial.