Checklist for Retailers: Is Your Digital Infrastructure Ready for the Holiday Traffic Avalanche? 

Approximately 60% of the US population shops on Black Friday making it one of the most important days of the year for retailers. Cyber Monday/Cyber Week attracts even more people, with 76% of all US consumers participating. (source: National Retail Federation) 

Ensuring your retail platform is production-ready isn’t just a case of having the front-end site up and running, it’s about preparing the entire ecosystem to minimize major outage, downtime, handle increased demand and ensure seamless performance. 

The cost of failing to prepare: downtime, broken links and lost revenue 

Downtime affects organizations of all sizes across industries. But the costs of downtime are highest in the retail industry due to higher levels of lost revenue, increased contractual and legal expenses, and a bigger impact on staffing and productivity than in any other industry.  But what’s the average cost of downtime? 

• A one-hour outage cost Amazon an estimated $34 million in sales. 
• A 20-minute crash during Singles’ Day sales cost Alibaba billions. 
• Costco website outage costs millions of dollars during thanksgiving day. 
• Microcenter experienced a series of issues over the course of 45 minutes during a Black Friday event. Due to high amounts of traffic, their website took more than 10 seconds to load, or it did not load at all. 

Source: Business Insider and Forbes.

Apart from such huge revenue losses, other major detrimental impacts, which any ecommerce retailer wouldn’t want to experience, include:  

• Low quality user experiences.  
• Increased operational costs. 
• Loss of competitive edge. 

How can you safeguard your retail operations during peak season? 

Now that the time is short to run a full-scale reliability evaluation before the next major event, how can you ensure you are ready to face the unforeseen problems that are likely to occur? In addition, if you have run a sophisticated holiday readiness check, how do you ensure that nothing is left out?  

With the stakes so high, now is the time to do everything possible to minimize risks and ensure you have a resilient system, even in case of unpredicted setbacks. 

Here is a comprehensive and targeted checklist to follow as a final check for your true holiday season readiness.  

✓ Step 1: Preparation prevents poor performance

Identify Systems

Plan to identify the key systems and business processes expected to experience a surge in traffic. For example: for an ecommerce site, we may prioritize the following systems:

• Website and front-end systems.
• Payment gateways.
• Inventory management system – IMS.
• Order Management system – OMS.
• Customer relationship management – CRM.
• Third-party integrations.

✓ Step 2: Apply the systemic seasonal checklist for systems identified

Process Optimization:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Walmart faced unprecedented online demand. Their strict processes on prioritizing preparation and response strategies successfully navigated the high-demand situations without significant disruptions. Focus on the below important process centric areas: 

□ Security and Contract Audits: 

• Conduct a thorough security review, including scanning for vulnerabilities, updating firewalls, renewing security certificates, and securing sensitive data (e.g., payment gateways). 

• Review the terms for vendor/cloud provider contract renewal, including any automatic renewal clauses or notice periods for non-renewal.

□ Code Freeze: 

• Ensure a full freeze to happen 2-4 weeks before the event. No new code (except critical bug fixes or security patches) should be deployed. 

• During the freeze, establish a process for emergency changes (e.g., hotfixes for critical bugs or security vulnerabilities). This process should involve approvals from senior management and testing to ensure stability.

□ Knowledge Base Review: 

• Train L1 teams to handle common issues, troubleshooting workflows, and key escalation procedures. 

• Update and distribute the standard operating procedures with most recent troubleshooting guides aligned from the DEVs and SREs. 

• Include documentation on external system dependencies (e.g., payment gateways, third-party services, etc.) so that L1 can quickly diagnose external dependencies. 

• Establish dedicated communication channels with other teams (L2, L3, DevOps, security, etc.). These could be specific Slack channels, Microsoft Teams, or a dedicated hotline for emergencies. 

□ Incident Triage and Prioritization: 

• Create incident categories (e.g., payment failures, checkout issues, site slowness, product unavailability) to help prioritize incoming issues. 

• For P1 and P2 issues, immediately notify the L2 or DevOps team as per escalation protocols. 

• For P3 and P4 issues, follow scripted procedures based on the KB (e.g., basic troubleshooting for login, order processing, or payment issues). 

□ Escalation Management: 

• Establish a clear escalation matrix indicating when and how issues are escalated to L2 support, DevOps, security, or the development team. 

• Automated escalations for mission-critical issues like payment processing failures, website downtime, or database overloads. 

• Provide the L1 team with escalation templates (e.g., specific information required, logs, steps taken) to ensure effective and quick handovers to L2. 

Code and Data Management:

Prioritize code and data management to ensure the following:

• Ensure up-to-date code and real-time data are deployed in both primary and secondary environments. 

•  Implement database backups, testing restore processes regularly. 

• Use redundant databases and archive historical data to minimize load on production databases. 

• Schedule jobs to run regular database maintenance and avoid disruptions during peak events. 

Capacity Planning & Cloud Architecture: 

• Evaluate expected user load against system capacity. 

• Confirm autoscaling is configured in cloud environments to handle the increased load dynamically. 

• Review the cloud deployment architecture to ensure it supports seamless scaling, high availability, and disaster recovery mechanisms. 

• Test failover between primary and secondary environments through gamedays. 

Monitoring and Alerting:

Monitoring and alerting systems are key to identifying issues before they escalate:

• Develop customized dashboards showing real-time metrics for critical systems. 

• Set thresholds for key metrics (CPU, response times, error rates) to trigger early alerts. 

• Implement multiple severity thresholds (e.g., Informational, Warning, Critical). 

• Ensure traceability across all layers of your application architecture by implementing full stack observability to reduce MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution). 

Business Contingency:

Ensure a robust backup and disaster recovery plan: 

• Cloud provider agreements should cover autoscaling and on-demand resources for traffic surges. 

• Ensure third-party vendors (e.g., payment gateways, CRM providers) have contingency plans and are included in your monitoring and support structures. 

• Automate environment failovers to meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). 

Key benefits:

By implementing this comprehensive checklist, you will achieve the following benefits:

Improved customer experience

A well-prepared infra can handle increased load, traffic which enhances the overall customer experience.

Increased sales

A responsive website will attract more customers leading to increased sales.

Reduced operational cost

Proactive preparation can help prevent system failure and reduce extra operational costs such as of support teams and infrastructure related costs. 

Data-driven decision making

Monitoring and analyzing performance data can provide valuable insights for future planning. 

Maximize revenue and ensure seamless operations with Qualitest

Qualitest offers comprehensive solutions to help retailers quickly prepare for the holiday season and Black Friday events. Our performance testing services are designed to ensure exceptional performance under peak pressure. We create a detailed test plan, conduct rigorous performance testing, and develop a tailored performance test strategy to meet your business needs. 

We also set up a performance test regression suite and provide a robust, reusable automated test framework, ensuring your system is ready for future growth and capable of delivering a fast, error-free end-to-end customer experience. 

By identifying and fixing performance bugs, handling peak loads, and ensuring data persistence, Qualitest helps retailers maximize revenue potential, gain a competitive edge, and improve customer experience during the holiday season. 

Prepare your ecommerce platform with Qualitest and make this Black Friday your most successful one yet!