How to make every transaction count this holiday season

By Betty Lin, Regional Manager, Hong Kong & Taiwan, Akamai Technologies | Jan 12, 2012

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Most retailers who suffered through the holiday season with inconsistent availability and poor site performance can likely trace back to a failure to incorporate back-to-basics planning. Surprisingly, many ecommerce teams are still relying on paper-based projections to assess their infrastructure’s ability to scale. The steps to planning for zero downtime can be managed independent of budget and time limitations. Here are five basic steps to prepare for the holidays.

1. Understand every event on your sale calendar

With flash sales and the proliferation of mobile devices, the dynamics of each event can vary. In identifying potential weaknesses, it is essential to map out the characteristics of each event on your sale calendar as they may dictate significant changes in shopper behavior online. Learn from events:

• Breadth of sale – Will it be for a single product or a small subset of products?
• Sale limitations – Are there limitations in a shopper’s ability to take advantage of the event? Is there a short time window?
• Target shoppers – Are you targeting fans on Facebook? Will it attract a larger audience on mobile devices? 
• Shopper requirements – Is the sale only available to participants in your registered store card program?
• Projections – How many shoppers do you expect to attract? Do any of the sale characteristics suggest that the sale will drive higher than average conversion rates?

By identifying these characteristics you’ll be able to better define the pace and timeline of users coming onto your site, key user flows, and map out potential vulnerabilities.

DDos attacks: A DDos attack should be an event you plan for like any other, particularly when your infrastructure is already expected to be under strain from revenue-generating traffic. 2010 Cyber Monday in the U.S. saw an unprecedented level of coordinated attacks against retailers that continued throughout the holiday season.

2. Load testing

A surprising number of ecommerce vendors are still bypassing load testing or failing to run load tests with real-world characteristics. However, it is essential to know where vulnerabilities exist.

We have learnt from events resulting in architectural failure that it is critical to understand your shopper’s behaviour. A user shopping online at a sale will have a much faster conversion cycle with less browsing activity than a browser participating in a traditional sale. In some cases, this means your shopping cart will see much higher load than your catalogue. Plan to map your expected user site flows with each sale activity and ensure all are load tested using distributed load-testing providers. This is directly applicable to sites with large mobile audiences.

3.    Prioritize known vulnerabilities

Even with the promise of on-demand scale with cloud-based services, all ecommerce sites face limitations.

For example, a survey1 conducted by Akamai found that anonymous shopper page requests, including bot activity, can account for up to 60% of total site traffic. While all home, category, and product pages are dynamically generated, most often anonymous users receive a page that is consistently displayed from user to user. Offloading anonymous page requests from your constrained application and database tiers should enable your site to immediately accommodate more traffic growth.

Load testing should provide a clear picture of the limitations in your environment, and allow you to make critical trade-offs in your plan to address them.

It is also critical to meet with a cross-functional team to assess and develop a plan of action based on potential brand and revenue impact.

4.    Identify a contingency plan for attacks and downtime

The contingency options can range from sophisticated solutions that take years to plan for - e.g. an alternate data center, to a simple failover page that could keep your brand intact and let you update customers through it.

Use options that protect your servers from high load while allowing you to process transactions. Many retailers employ a throttling application that allows you to move a segment of visitors to a branded site experience when trouble strikes. The key is having the option to immediately re-route a percentage of shoppers and keeping them engaged until your servers can handle the requests.
 
5. Coordinate your operational response to problems

Everyone including your critical technology partners should be aware of their responsibilities during an unexpected event and are prepared to respond.

Don’t gamble with holiday success… Plan for it!
Online retailers are now facing a more complex selling environment. With the rush for sales like Cyber Monday, every minute your site is unavailable could cost your company thousands of dollars. Planning and being prepared is the key that can dramatically improve your ability to capture every transaction.

_{1 “Scaling Your Infrastructure to Crush It During Peak Events—an Akamai Commerce Holiday Solution”}