On the first day of Christmas, my truelove sent to me: site crashes, lockouts, too much traffic to cope with, a terrible customer experience, and a massive loss of revenue…
Black Friday looks as though it was as popular as ever in 2024, despite the problems retailers—online and off—have faced over holiday season over a very tricky few years.
Cast your mind back to 2020. The COVID pandemic taught us to rely ever-heavily on our ecommerce websites. It wasn’t only our supermarkets that saw massive spikes in customers choosing safer contactless online shopping. The varying lockdowns and non-essential retail outlet closures taught those who weren’t so savvy with eCommerce that there was a whole new way to get their hands on the goods they needed.
As life has slowly returned to some kind of normal, we’re now facing a new set of problems. Demand is as high as it ever was, higher in fact, but due to transport and supply issues, shoppers face further challenges procuring the items they want and need during holiday season, and even more, meeting their delivery schedules in time for opening presents.
Black Friday deals won’t hold quite the same kind of delivery expectations as our Christmas shopping will, but still drive traffic. We’re all likely to be happier to wait a few extra days (or weeks!) to receive our knockdown or half-price TV, console, mobile device or gadget than we are in holiday season.
But at Christmas? If those gifts aren’t under the tree by the 24th, there’s going to be a lot of broken hearts and tears come Christmas morning.
Despite local and global delivery issues making the news almost daily, many consumers will still leave their shopping until the last minute—we’re just human, after all. Sadly, with that comes more holiday season pressure on an already struggling e commerce system, and all at a time when customers have less time for a slow page load.
According to a Retail Trend Report from Deloitte, online shoppers are likely to increase by 3.3% over the festive season of 2024. That's a lot of extra website traffic, to massively boost sales - if you can handle the holiday traffic peak - and if you can't, it doesn't matter how good your content strategy or advertising is for your product pages, people won't be able to spend money with your company. The survey (carried out in the US and UK) showed that customers are unlikely to change their shopping habits during the holidays despite the global supply chain issues that suppliers and logistics companies face today.
Ecommerce is becoming a mighty battleground for retailers on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire Christmas shopping season.
With fewer items available from each retailer during holiday season, thanksgiving or other holidays, our online shoppers are likely to be on a wilder hunt than ever for this year’s latest must-have gifts, spending time online jumping from retailer to retailer to snap up those last few gold-dust purchases from businesses, increasing website traffic, especially more traffic from mobile devices.
Will that affect the amount of website traffic that hits our e commerce stores? You bet it will.
We used to believe that Amazon controlled everything and anything online shopping. Yet, as research from groups including Conductor shows, customers are heading for specific sellers instead of running straight to the all-encompassing giant. And if they don’t have the items that they’re looking for? Well, it’s on to the next. And the next. And the next…
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If you’re an online retailer, are you ready for massive online retail traffic from social media, organic traffic, or search engine optimization? Can your system safely manage the vastly increased numbers of holiday visitors we’re expecting to see as we hit December and for the rest of the month? Or are you crossing your fingers your existing purchase systems won’t be stretched to breaking point during world holiday shopping season?
When it comes to increased web traffic from holiday visitors and bandwidth issues, several practices can help ease the pressure of more internet traffic and provide your users with a better experience as they purchase, keeping customers happy and informed and keeping hold of the sales you depend on.
You could upgrade your website in late november or early december to manage bigger numbers, adding more christmas holiday traffic capacity when you need it—but do you know how much you’re likely to need and what that costs?
Alternatively, you could take advantage of content distribution networks or compression filters. They could help, or you could add a simple, single line of JavaScript to organize all of your overflow christmas traffic into a neat and orderly queue.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, the good news is, it is.
Queue-Fair offers retailers an off-site virtual waiting room — a neat and ordered queuing system that’s fair, fast, and great for business. When your website isn’t under pressure, you won’t even know it’s there. When it is, it’ll save your site from unwanted crashes, failed search traffic, slow-downs, lock-ups, and lost sales.
Here’s how it works:
Traffic flows into your website. If everything is okay, life carries on as usual. However, if you’re close to your traffic limit, new users will be filtered away from your website into a first-come, first-served queue until it’s their turn to return to your website and complete their purchase.
What’s better, those customers are continually informed of every detail and data they need—from their position in the queue to the time until they'll flow back into the site. What’s better still, with so many customization options, you can use that time to upsell or introduce your queue to associated items and more must-have special offers on your sites.
Before you know it, they’re back on your site with a full basket, and everyone’s managed to stay calm, collected, and comforted.
For those who don’t know what that is, it’s the period of highly-anticipated heavy traffic where engineers and managers are reluctant to update or alter their websites in case teething problems and testing causes a drop in traffic or unseen issues from unexpected bugs and setbacks.
With that in mind, most updates typically scheduled for cyber monday sales or December are held back until January, when there’s a lot less to lose with far lower traffic and sales stakes on the table - though christmas day itself remains a low traffic day.
Queue-Fair doesn’t add any complicated and troublesome updates to your website—all it takes is a single line of JavaScript, easy to add to any wordpress site or other web platform in seconds.
For those who want more control, it offers server side integration, but to get you through the frantic, festive period, all it takes is a simple, single line of code and your chrismas traffic business problems are solved, keeping you ahead of the market competition while you can focus on relaxing through the holiday.
For online retailers who want to create an effective and structured solution to that extra, expected traffic, Queue-Fair delivers the peace of mind you need for all the holiday seasons to come, as well as the peace and goodwill of the holiday period.
This article first published at Smart Retail Tech.
Invented and patented in 2004, Queue-Fair is the original Virtual Waiting Room, providing online queue management for busy websites and apps.
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