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Don’t Let the Grinch Steal Your Holiday Sales — 7 Tips for IT Teams to Avoid Digital Downtime

As the pandemic continues to drive shoppers away from brick-and-mortar, online retail sales are expected to grow 33% this holiday to a staggering $189 billion. Online sales will surpass $2 billion every day between November 1-21, and increase to $3 billion a day from November 22 to December 3. According to Adobe Analytics, almost half of these sales (42%) will be made on smartphones.

But can digital storefronts handle this anticipated uptick? We’ve already seen that, for companies unprepared for the sudden shift to digital-only or who struggled to pivot quickly enough, the lack of readiness has had major business impacts. Even big-name retailers are suffering, with significant layoffs, store closures and revenue losses, including bankruptcy or liquidation.

The key to thriving in today’s pandemic-driven economy is ensuring that online services — mobile apps and websites — are delivering the best customer experience possible by allowing consumers to shop online in a frictionless and reliable way. The responsibility for this falls on retailer’s technical teams: the people who make sure it’s easy to navigate the website, access up-to-date product details, cash in on online promotions and find out if a product is still in stock at a local store. These teams also are charged with ensuring a smooth and secure checkout process and preventing website crashes. As critical as a cashier or salesperson is to in-store service, these tech workers are essential to maintaining a seamless ecommerce experience.

With digital as today’s primary storefront, retailers have to be able to fix issues as they occur and anticipate them ahead of time. At PagerDuty, we work with 13,000+ companies, including American Eagle, Lululemon and Shopify, to ensure their digital services work perfectly when customers need it most. Because the fact is that the cost of digital downtime can be huge — I’ve seen retailers lose upwards of $500K every minute.

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The solution? Hypercare. This is what we call the period of time immediately after a system goes live, where an elevated level of tech support is available to ensure everything runs smoothly. For industries that experience peak traffic periods (like retail during the holidays), aligning the business to apply hypercare principles during that time allows for a smoother customer experience and minimizes headaches for the teams supporting critical services. In the same way that storefronts increase staffing and stock shelves so clerks can provide the utmost care and service to shoppers during the holidays, technical teams must give that same attention to the website so that online shoppers have a smooth experience.

Here are seven steps to help your IT team ensure that you’re equipped to handle increased traffic on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday shopping season, limiting digital downtime and maximizing profits:

  • Service ownership readiness: Make sure the teams responsible for critical digital services are equipped with need-to-know information, including who’ll be on call if something goes wrong, when was the last time service went down and what caused the crash.
  • Conduct a fire drill: Practice your incident process so that when an actual crash occurs, each member of the team is prepared, knows their role and can easily engage with other responders.
  • Build dashboards for visibility: Setting up an easy-access data center lets all your stakeholders stay alert and aware of any issues occurring in the online environment, like servers nearing capacity or an oncoming spike in traffic.
  • Press pause on IT updates: Implementing a code freeze, to ensure no changes in your code during peak holiday periods, goes a long way toward preventing crashes. The only changes that should occur are those related to resolving incidents or customer/revenue-impacting problems. Save all other tweaks or updates until the new year.
  • Understand your limits: Load test and capacity plan to establish a baseline of what your system can handle, and ensure capacity exists to take on your estimated peak demand.
  • Invest in quality monitoring: Cyber Monday requires more thanjust real-time monitoring — make sure you’re also set up with synthetic monitoring, a technique using scripted recordings of transactions to simulate an action or path that a customer would take on a site before it happens, to stay ahead of issues before they arise.
  • Over-communicate: Establish a clear stakeholder communication process so that everyone, including customer service, IT, engineering teams and executives, knows how they will receive status updates on incidents and where to go to find more information.

This has been a challenging year for retailers and customers alike. As we head into a holiday season with massive profit potential, retailers have an opportunity to make up for lost time and reconnect with buyers. There are already enough challenges to overcome this holiday season, from reduced traffic and capacity restrictions to a potential shippageddon — so don’t let digital downtime be what prevents you from making a successful holiday season a reality. By helping tech teams get prepared, you can make sure that downtime doesn’t prevent you from giving customers a perfect experience, every time.


As SVP of Product, Jonathan Rende brings to PagerDuty over 25 years of experience in the mobile, performance management and automated software quality industries. Rende has held various product, marketing and engineering executive roles with Informix, Mercury/HP Software, Appcelerator and Keynote Systems. Prior to joining PagerDuty, he served as the Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Castlight Health, Inc., where his focus was on delivering and launching to market their next-generation predictive analytics platform for enterprises.

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