Black Friday is a crucial period for retailers, especially for e-commerce businesses. This annual event attracts a massive influx of customers looking for attractive deals and discounts. To make the most of Black Friday, flawless execution is essential, any disruption or delay can directly impact customer satisfaction and sales performance.
Issues related to availability, loading times, or system outages can not only result in lost revenue but also damage your brand’s reputation. That’s why thorough preparation and a well-coordinated execution are key to ensuring a smooth and profitable Black Friday season.
In this article, we’ll show you the impact Black Friday can have on large retailers using an All-in-One solution with a (virtual) server-based architecture, and share an example of how to reduce that impact with a more flexible approach.
How do retailers prepare today?
Black Friday is no longer limited to a single day. The discount period now stretches well beyond a week, with presale campaigns and early deals. And for those who missed out, new offers often follow right after Black Friday, making it a long, competitive season for retailers.
To stay ahead, many retailers start preparing as early as September. The competition is fierce, and if your competitor launches their Black Friday campaign earlier than expected, you need to be able to react fast.
Adding extra servers
Reacting quickly starts with ensuring your platform can handle the surge in traffic. To prepare, retailers often scale up the number of front-end servers in their existing platform architecture well in advance. These servers must be cloned and thoroughly tested, a manual process that takes time and resources. Because of this, implementing changes to the platform in the run-up to Black Friday becomes increasingly difficult.
Disabling personalization & expanding caching
To reduce the load on the platform, features like page or block-level personalization are often disabled in advance. At the same time, caching is expanded and extended. Caching, temporarily storing pages so they can load faster when revisited, is applied even to requests or pages that normally wouldn’t be cached. This allows returning visitors to see previously viewed pages faster.
While this results in better performance, turning off personalization means visitors no longer receive tailored content. That can negatively impact relevance and the overall user experience.
Monitoring platform load
During the Black Friday period, many retailers continuously monitor platform load, both to assess whether more servers are needed and to ensure that other parts of the architecture (such as databases) can handle the traffic. Scaling up is a manual process. When problems are detected, software updates need to be deployed manually across all servers.
Communication is critical
Strong communication between IT teams and product managers is more important than ever. If a competitor suddenly lowers prices across a product category, a retailer may need to follow suit, triggering thousands of platform updates. Or, if a new campaign goes live, it can put additional pressure on the system. To respond quickly, the team must stay alert and ready to act on incoming updates at any time.
How does this work with Composable Commerce?
While the current approach provides a temporary solution for many retailers during the busy Black Friday period, there are major advantages to using a platform that’s built for scalability. A modern platform based on a Composable architecture offers exactly that.
Such a platform is built on MACH principles and leverages cloud-native services designed to scale automatically with demand. Each service fulfills a specific role, such as powering e-commerce functionality, delivering content or images, or providing search capabilities. A Composable platform is more powerful, allowing it to handle high traffic more efficiently and often keeping features like personalization fully enabled.
In addition, updates can typically be deployed automatically, and services monitor themselves for issues. Because less manual maintenance is required, internal communication pressure also decreases.
By adopting a Composable architecture, retailers can not only reduce operational strain but also deliver a faster, more responsive, and more robust customer experience, significantly increasing the chances of a smooth and successful Black Friday period.
Want to learn more?
Curious how a Composable architecture can help your retail business become more agile and better prepared for Black Friday success? We’d love to tell you more.
