Cyber Monday is a massive sales day for e-commerce players. According to Adobe Analytics, it brought in $79 billion in online sales in the US in 2018 outpacing Black Friday’s $6.2 billion. This year, the level is expected to be even higher, making it important for all e-tailers.
Last year, Etsy transacted almost $19,000 gross merchandise sales (GMS) per minute on Cyber Monday 2018, making it the company’s highest-ever single-day performance. The American e-commerce company will be looking to replicate and even exceed its past success.
To capitalize on Cyber Monday’s volume, the e-tailers must be equipped to handle the surge of activity on their websites without hampering consumer experience. Etsy estimates the Cyber Monday traffic to be twice its normal-day activity putting around 1 million queries a second. This includes actions like searches that doubled on Cyber Monday 2018 relative to an average Monday.
According to Etsy CTO Mike Fisher (from Business Insider), if a site can’t handle this significant increase in traffic and queries, it can lead to performance issues. And if these issues cause sluggishness or downtime, Cyber Monday consumers hungry for deals might get frustrated and even abandon their shopping carts. To prevent this, Etsy has taken a few steps to helps its technical performance during Cyber Monday:
- Etsy increased how many people are on call to help consumers on Cyber Monday. The e-tailer always has people on the call to help consumers with any issue they have on-site, but Etsy increased staff during Cyber Week, running from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, fisher said.
- The e-tailer ran a battery of tests and made numerous plans for the event in advance. Etsy is already planning for Cyber Monday 2020, Fisher said emphasizing how much time goes into the process. The company plans out its computer capacity and tests its speeds. It also does a “premortem” in which it examines what might fail or cause difficulties with its technology or business operation when traffic is increased. This sort of planning reduces the impact of glitches as well as other issues that can pop-up on Cyber Monday.