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Keeping the net working on Cyber Monday

By Phil Worms

December 3, 2012 | 5 min read

Have you been caught up in the madness of Cyber Monday? Or is it Mega Monday? Whatever it is – and maybe the marketers should actually agree on a tagline – today is likely to be the busiest and craziest day of the year for online retailers in the UK with around 115m consumers predicted to do their Christmas shopping over the internet.

Phil Worms

While some of the more traditional retailers have still invested in the usual flurry of evocative tv adverts even these are very much designed to send traffic to their websites where they hope those ‘today only’ discounts will lure us into spending like there’s no tomorrow.

As we’ve been clicking ‘add to basket’ on our laptops, mobiles and tablets, the IT systems of the retailers have been be busy matching each order to the product sitting in a cold warehouse in the middle of an industrial estate. Gigabytes and Terabytes of data have been transmitted from e-commerce platforms hosted on servers in data centres through to warehousing logistics departments.

For anyone working on the IT side of e-commerce a day like this can be a very nervous day indeed because outages can happen. Even Amazon, that giant of online retail which expects to take more than 2 million orders today, has suffered its fair share of problems in the past. Website failures can be caused by a peak of traffic that exceeds a network’s capacity, a power problem, or even just a badly designed IT platform.

It’s essential then that the sales transaction and business IT platforms you’ve deployed are working to deliver the most satisfying customer experience. Fulfilment is the order of the day with the whole process meticulously planned to ensure that longed-for Christmas present makes its way to the right address, on the right day, via the right delivery network.

This takes long-term planning, not just on-the-day reaction. When our retail hosting customers are planning their Christmas campaigns they make judgements about the amount of extra visitors they expect to get to their website and then we work with them to ensure they have the capacity to spin up extra servers to cope. As a hosting company our duty is to ensure that they remain online all the time so our technicians will have consulted with them in detail. If they’re a really big retailer, we’ll have created a fail over platform in another of our data centres so that if their website does implode with the peak load demand they can automatically switch to what is essentially a mirror of their website and continue to trade.

There are two aspects to consider. If your Twitter and Facebook campaign has sent traffic soaring, the last thing you want is for the transactional website to crash. Equally if your campaign sets demand for a particular product soaring – yes the Furby is back! – and supply can’t meet it, you could also be done for. The tech therefore not only for the online purchases but also for the warehouse logistics needs to be right – what we call the front-end and the back-end. It’s an integral part of making your Christmas and that of your clients, a very merry one.

Two years ago only a few e-commerce sites were enabled for mobile purchases. Today with smartphone and tablet users much more likely now to make impulse buys, almost all are able to take orders and payments via Apple and Android apps adding even more complication to the maze of IT a retailer has to use.

So while you’ve been clicking ‘add to basket’ during this crazy Cyber shopping experience, I hope you’ve spared a thought for the process that small click has behind it. Whatever you’ve been promoting and however you’ve been engaging with shoppers, I hope the technology has stood up and you’ve achieved the maximum bang for your buck from your campaign. Happy shopping!

Phil Worms is marketing director for cloud computing company iomart Hosting, sponsors of the Social Buzz Awards

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