Black Friday’s in-store shopping fell by 52.1% this year as online sales broke world records — ranking it as the second-largest online spending day in U.S. history. Our customers saw revenue increases on average of nearly 50% from 2019.

Unfortunately, major traffic spikes always run the risk of an outage — regardless of your company’s size or eCommerce platform. Last year, Costco, Best Buy and Nordstrom Rack all suffered outages during Black Friday that led to major losses. Costco alone lost a devastating 11 million dollars from 16 hours of downtime. 

According to the IDC, for the Fortune 1000, the average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is around $100,000 an hour, while a critical application failure is around $500,000 to $1 million per hour. The cost of spending extra time to make sure you won’t go down during the holidays is far lower.

While there’s no silver bullet for these disasters, studies show that 53% of all outages could have been prevented if those responsible for the system had been more proactive. Here at Melon, we are celebrating another year of outage-free Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales for all of our clients — A standard we have maintained since Melon was founded. That is no accident.

There are several key contributing factors that lead to a successful holiday season:

1. Understand that a fix like increasing server capacity is a bandaid, not a solution. It is a sign of a far larger issue that needs to be addressed. It will be exposed during a traffic spike like Black Friday and there will be no quick fix. Increasing server capacity has a ceiling.

2. Please re-read number one. If you have had to increase your hosting setup, you need to revisit why. 

3. Put a code freeze in place prior to the holidays with enough time to thoroughly test the stability of the final build. Do not try and squeeze last-minute, untested functionality for the holidays.

4. Run load tests on your environment to understand what traffic levels you can handle. Make sure the load tests are comprehensive and include adding items to the cart, searching, and purchasing. Your site should be able to handle at least twice peak traffic loads. 

5. Have action plans for the different types of outages and issues that can occur and make sure your team or your partner is on standby to address anything as quickly as possible. 

P.S. 

Costco, if you’re reading this, we have wanted to fix your eCommerce experience for years now. We love you and you can do better. Email our president. He is on standby.