Preparing for Peak Season

Victor

We are approaching the end-of-year holiday season and you can smell already smell the frenzy shopping which will make or break your sales objectives in a few weeks. If your company isn't into BlackFriday/CyberMonday/Single's Day/Boxing Day, I'm sure you still have similar events at another point of the year, and being ready for it is crucial. Here a few tips on how to prepare:

• Prepare way in advance: the earlier the better. Review last year's performance, take learnings, agree on actions, engage all relevant stakeholders… Put everything in a calendar and track progress - good project management style!
• "Bug extermination" to ensure everything runs smoothly and implement a strict code freeze so you only release absolutely crucial things.
• Schedule and test all promotions, content and functionalities so you double-check everything is working fine. Ideally in production too, just be careful you do it in the dark: limiting it to certain IPs, or at times when you have low visitors…
• Check your monitoring systems and how to report revenue updates to keep your upper management happy
• Know your shop limitations by doing some volume-stress tests, implementing improvements and creating backup plans in case performance starts to degrade, such as sending emails blasts per waves, having a queueing mechanism…
• Review the contacts lists and standard operating procedures: who does what where and when, how to reach out if a critical error occurs, set up the correct forums to jump in if needed (conference call details, Teams Room, Slack channel…), do some dry runs in case a P1 happens…

That's my list after "suffering" many BlackFridays! Any other idea or best practice?

Alberto Reyer

Pretty much a good and complete list.

One "failover" you could implement, to reduce customer discontent, is a static page in S3 with a generic discount code for later usage. If nothing else will work you can activate these page and at least keep some of the customers, that were otherwise unable to order anything at all, to order at a later point.
That's how we survived "Höhle der Löwen" (german tv show, similar to shark tanks).

From business perspective, comming from a company that centered there whole ecommerce strategy around flash sales, plan some extra contingents of high demand products (~5%) and keep them in a separate inventory.
This will allow to reduce dissatisfaction and handle overselling to a certain degree.
Also in a multi-warehouse situation, for example do to multi-country setup with own warehouses, you might be able to handle higher demands in a certain country with this separate contingent.
Downside, if not needed you might have some extra products in your warehourse, that you wanted to clear. So it's pretty much a product by product decision, which depends on the question, will I sell this product outside of the "sales event"?

Another trick, I've learned, once a product is sold out, show a "sorry" message with either alternative products or a small discount code, to at least get something out of the traffic, especially if it is paid traffic like google ads, and reduce customer dissatisfaction.

LilyAcrossDimensions

Great tips!