Most large retail operations are preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday season.  Even those who aren’t actively preparing for it are at least thinking about it.  Updates are put in place to eCommerce, the applications, the navigational paths, features, the inventory system, or the devices people use to shop with.

When you make all these changes to your website and applications, there is increased risks that should be monitored for issues. Load testing should be a top priority. At the same time, it’s a cycle that retailers are used to.

Christmas in July

Now Amazon, the 5000 lbs. gorilla, is throwing a monkey wrench into the season of ecommerce, with a Christmas in July event.  The huge online sales event  is very much hyped and I have no doubt that the affects will go beyond Amazon.

1. People shop Amazon but they also shop around–I believe that a huge event attracting more shoppers to Amazon will have ripple effects in the rest of online traffic.
2. It will be ever more important to delight your customers if you are not Amazon. Your website must perform flawlessly, the experience must be excellent, and if you’re not Amazon you have to retain loyalty by being a great place to shop all the time.

Although Amazon is huge – if events like this work, smaller retailers could manufacture similar events within their specific markets.

Web Traffic Ripple Effect

In any case, these concentrated events and their ripple effects for traffic across the web mean that you need to be even more vigilant with the performance of your websites and all their parts.  Your customer experience matters even more – it can’t vary. You need a good baseline around performance so that variances can be tracked and a system that helps you find problems before any customers do.

Check out this article about the Amazon Prime Day from Internet Retailer: https://www.internetretailer.com/2015/07/08/amazons-prime-day-could-push-e-retailers-margins-lower