How to Prepare Your Applications for the Holiday Season

As the holidays rapidly approach, it is important for online companies to ensure that their websites and applications are ready for the surge in customer activity. As retailers become increasingly motivated to move merchandize towards the end of the year, consumers are offered numerous deals and discounts to encourage purchases.

With an increased volume of activity, your company must prepare to serve high customer demands. For instance, Legacy applications running on mainframes are incapable of scaling to support the traffic. Therefore, companies must ensure that their apps are modernized, agile, scalable, and flexible to continue performing well into the holiday season.

E-Commerce Holiday Figures

If you want to make this your best holiday season yet as an online retailer, a few small changes must be made to help ensure your site performs to the full extent of its capabilities. Apps should be built via microservices where various functions of the app are flexible enough to support increased activity and ultimately provide a more positive customer experience. Furthermore, your organization can look forward to no un-planned downtimes and lower costs to support new customers.

Consider these *e-commerce statistics during the holidays versus regular periods:

• November and December are responsible for driving 30% more ecommerce revenue than regular, non-holiday months.
• Black Friday begins a long period of increased sales. From this day until Christmas, retailers will bring in 50-100% more revenue compared to standard shopping days.
• The two categories that are the most sensitive to holiday shopping periods are apparel and accessories, as well as, computers and electronics.

*Source: https://rjmetrics.com/resources/reports/ecommerce-holiday-trends/

Utilizing Automated Services to Help Support Your System

For e-commerce companies, a faulty website can lead to long-lasting, adverse effects on your business. Planning for an influx of users in advance ensures that your site can handle it and continue running as normal. At Next Pathway, we offer both Array™ and Mercury™ solutions to help your organization build increasingly agile applications. These automated services are extremely adaptable and able to withstand consistently high volumes of activity, including peak periods around the holidays.

Next Pathway is at the forefront of the digital transformation industry. Contact us today for more information about our automated tools and services.