Are you ready for the surges in your system?
If you're an online store owner, are you prepared for the massive surge in website traffic from social media, organic traffic, and search engine optimization (SEO)? As Christmas period shopping ramps up, can your system handle the spike in visitors expected throughout December? With holiday season disruptions and increased traffic jams from the holiday rush, more consumers are turning to eCommerce for their Christmas shopping needs.
With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas Day fast approaching, the demand for Christmas travel essentials and last-minute gifts will intensify. If your site isn’t optimized for increased traffic, it might crash, causing site lockouts and frustrating customers, leading to lost sales. As traffic jams and severe weather disrupt physical shopping, online stores are becoming the go-to for many shoppers.
Is your infrastructure ready for this surge in demand? Relying on major players like Amazon isn’t enough. Research from Conductor and other groups shows that consumers are increasingly seeking out specific online stores rather than flocking to Amazon. If a retailer lacks the desired products, shoppers will quickly move to the next.
The last thing you want during Christmas period shopping is scrambling to upgrade your systems amidst Cyber Monday or the festive season. Ensure your eCommerce platform is optimized to handle the anticipated traffic surge, especially from mobile devices, while navigating supply chain issues and logistics challenges.
The Solution to Your eCommerce Demand Problem
When dealing with increased web traffic from holiday shoppers and bandwidth issues, several practices can help manage the Christmas period traffic surge and improve the customer experience. Ensuring smooth performance during the busiest online shopping days of the year is crucial to retaining sales during the festive season.
Consider upgrading your eCommerce website in late November or early December to prepare for the increase in traffic. Adding Christmas traffic capacity can help you manage the influx of shoppers, but do you know how much additional bandwidth you'll need and the cost of it? With traffic jams and unpredictable severe weather affecting public transport, more customers are expected to turn to online shopping, adding pressure to your site. Without prior planning, this surge in traffic reports could overwhelm your infrastructure.
Alternatively, utilize content distribution networks or compression filters to optimize site delivery, alleviating pressure on your servers. For a simpler solution, consider adding a line of JavaScript to efficiently organize Christmas traffic into an orderly queue. This minimizes delays and ensures a seamless shopping experience, even when traffic spikes.
It sounds simple—and it is. By preparing in advance and implementing these strategies, you can manage traffic surges, prevent site crashes, and ensure your platform handles the holiday season demand, increasing total spend and keeping customers satisfied.
Managing Your Excess Traffic into Customized, Comforting Queues
Queue-Fair offers retailers an off-site virtual waiting room—a fast, fair, and efficient queuing system that’s perfect for holiday shopping events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas travel peaks. When your website is running smoothly, you won’t even notice it. But when your site faces traffic surges during these high-demand periods, it will protect you from crashes, failed search traffic, slowdowns, lockups, and lost sales.
Here’s how it works:
Traffic enters your site. If traffic levels are normal, everything flows as usual. However, if you're nearing capacity, visitors are placed into a first-come, first-served queue until it's their turn to return and finish their Christmas period shopping. They’re kept informed throughout the process, with real-time updates on their queue position and estimated wait times, ensuring customers stay calm and reassured.
The best part? With many customization options, you can use this time to upsell and present special offers or highlight must-have deals, keeping shoppers engaged and reducing the chance they’ll abandon their purchase or switch to a competitor.
Before long, they return to your site with a full cart, and everyone remains calm and satisfied. By reducing the risk of site crashes and creating a smooth queue experience, Queue-Fair ensures a seamless shopping experience even during the most demanding shopping days.
What about the Christmas Change Freeze?
For those who aren’t familiar, the period of heavy traffic refers to the time when engineers and managers hesitate to update their websites, fearing that any changes might cause issues, bugs, or a drop in traffic during critical events like Cyber Monday or the Christmas period.
To avoid this, most updates, especially those scheduled for December, are delayed until January, when traffic levels are lower and the stakes for sales are not as high—although Christmas Day itself remains a low traffic day.
Queue-Fair has the CCF worriers covered
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.
