The Ecommerce Peak Holiday Season
With November 2020 behind us, and everyone prepping for Christmas and closing of the year, it is time to reflect on The Ecommerce Holiday Season that is partly behind us. With Singles Day, Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday all happening in just one month we have seen new records on each of these events.
Singles Day did well over $70B in sales, Black Friday hit $9B and Cyber Monday added nearly $12B to the month of ecommerce. Incredible numbers that would normally take many months to reach, all concentrated in just 3 November days.
Peak Pressure
During these days we at Dynamicweb keep an extra close eye on the ecommerce experience our customers are offering, speed is one of them. Even though we saw many of our customers handle 3 to 10 times the normal order rate, the environments were ‘just spinning like kittens in the Dynamicweb cloud’ to quote our CPO and co-founder Nicolai Pedersen.
*A Dynamicweb customer that is seeing a spike in ecommerce orders during the days running up to Black Friday
Over the past many years, cloud has shown that not only does it make it easier for organizations to adopt new technology, spread the investment and lower the cost of hosting technical solutions. Situations like these peak ecommerce days is where cloud really comes to its own. The ability to scale your capacity to 10x for just a couple of days would have been a nightmare before running your ecommerce environment in the cloud.
The Ecommerce Holiday Season & Covid
With Covid expectations for ecommerce were extra high this year. Many predicted that this year would be, again, record highs for ecommerce as many people took to their screens to order from home to avoid crowded brick-and-mortar shops and risk being infected by the virus. But with economic situations these were mere predictions, and nobody was sure what this year would bring.
Luckily many retail participants foresaw even bigger spikes than years before and started their Black Friday sales a bit earlier to spread the peak as much as possible, relieving not only their own fulfillment centers, but also the delivery services and offering everyone the possibility to get most of their orders inhouse intime.
Conclusion
With the big part of the Ecommerce Holiday Season behind us it is the time of the year to reflect on what a year it has been and to look forward to what next year will bring. Many organizations are working on plans for next year(s), where digital transformation has gotten a real seat at the table.